Why Agile In The Enterprise Generally Doesn’t Work

A lot of this is true though I don’t think this is all about incompetence. I see a lot of superiors being afraid of letting go of control. Which ends up with companies doing that whole “resource sandboxing” thing. Ending up with the illusion that R&D is a production department and not a creative and innovative department. Dan Pink pinpoints it perfectly in this video

Large organisations do not reward technical ability, only the position in the pymarid:
“You can only have a pay rise if you are managing a team.”
“You can only have a pay rise if you are managing a division.”

The worst part is that some of the people pushing a lot of the ‘agile’ stuff do not understand it and prescribe it as some sort of rigid process (which totally misses the point).

In my last job, only a handful of teams truly understood what it meant to be agile. For the best part of 3 years, the majority of the teams did a half-arsed version that had little value because they were forced into it by management. Neither the management or the team leads understood how to make it work. Management insisted the whole project was “agile”, while the teams basically didn’t care and just wanted to write code.

Worse still, our company actually had a dedicated “scrum coach”. Unfortunately, the scrum coach did no development and wasn’t in a team. He didn’t understand scrum or agile practices or how to tailor them to a team. Hilariously, back when he was in charge of a team, he fundamentally fucked up the basics, too! (I heard tales of unstructured standups that would last for over 30 minutes, huge backlogs of work planned out for years, no improvements after retrospectives etc.) You couldn’t make it up. If there’s anything worse than a half-arsed “we’re agile” management culture, it’s having an irrelevance with a scrum badge foisted upon you. Sigh.

The only teams that made it work for them were the ones who had their heads screwed on right in the first place — they took control, shut out the management meddling and put team/software engineering practices in place to get things done. Agile/Lean/Whatever else all have some excellent parts, but the moment out of touch managers get their hands on it, it’s as useless as anything else.

Mark +1, Jan +1

IMO if you want to make agile work in an enterprise environment you have to take their rules, regulations & policies as nothing more than guidance, and when they get in your way just ignore them and carry on. Okay it does help if your manager believes in the same ethos.

My current client follows the MS ‘golden’ path and has a ‘tech menu’ which doesn’t mention VS 2010, NHibernate, StructureMap, AutoMapper, OpenRasta but that doesn’t stop the team using them. Remember being pragmatic is big part of the job.

Going to Agile is not mean killing principles and organization culture. It means “just enough” principle and you should consider & balance agility and principle in large scale teams.

Computerisation of (at least) Western organisations took place over the last 30 years, which was accompanied by the rise of neoliberalism and reaganomics, a shift of capital and production to the East, globalisation, and the convertion of Western workforces to service providers, particularly in the service sector.

In a highly automated society that does not produce much of what it consumes, as long as we ration our inputs using ‘money’, the outcome can only be increasing redundancy. The core problem is the set of typical incentive structures that result: the West must employ millions of office workers somehow. There is no case for lean, agile, safe or efficient production if the prime goal is protecting your and your allies’ jobs.