Most so called "Agile Enthusiasts" are folks who used to get CMM and PMI certified and now get Scrum certified. I have interviewed hundreds of Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters and it's abundantly clear who gets it and who doesn't. I have become a huge fan of Josh Kerievsky and his Modern Agile movement, first introduced to me by my friend Jon Kern, one of the OG 12. I personally think that SAFe was the worst thing to happen to Agile. It's really hard to do well and it usually becomes a way for bean counters to have the illusion of control. It's also really hard to do PI planning remotely so I think that the best process in the remote combines some agile practices, along with tools like ProductBoard to give plenty of Real Time visibility to the Product Roadmap. The sequence should be Business Goal -> Design of Initiative -> Sprints/Kanban Queue -> Learning -> Validation against Business Goal -> Iterate and adapt the Initiative or Sprints / Tasks based on learning -> Repeat until done. What many people forget in bastardizing Scrum into Scrumban, injecting deliverables mid sprint was that sprint length was meant to give adequate time for completing work in a linear fashion, giving short intervals to run experiments. I've rarely seen actual Scrum in practice. Most "Agile" is ScrumBanFall - Business/Finance are Waterfall, Product/Eng follow Scrum in planning work, Business injects customer need, which upsets Sprints, excess WIP happens, everyone is confused, Estimates are f*cked, no one is happy, every is confused - did I say that already, most partially completed work needs to be redone, everyone worked harder, but got less done.
fuck. imagine if agile enthusiasts read (and marinated on) the actual manifesto... 🤣
Most so called "Agile Enthusiasts" are folks who used to get CMM and PMI certified and now get Scrum certified. I have interviewed hundreds of Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters and it's abundantly clear who gets it and who doesn't. I have become a huge fan of Josh Kerievsky and his Modern Agile movement, first introduced to me by my friend Jon Kern, one of the OG 12. I personally think that SAFe was the worst thing to happen to Agile. It's really hard to do well and it usually becomes a way for bean counters to have the illusion of control. It's also really hard to do PI planning remotely so I think that the best process in the remote combines some agile practices, along with tools like ProductBoard to give plenty of Real Time visibility to the Product Roadmap. The sequence should be Business Goal -> Design of Initiative -> Sprints/Kanban Queue -> Learning -> Validation against Business Goal -> Iterate and adapt the Initiative or Sprints / Tasks based on learning -> Repeat until done. What many people forget in bastardizing Scrum into Scrumban, injecting deliverables mid sprint was that sprint length was meant to give adequate time for completing work in a linear fashion, giving short intervals to run experiments. I've rarely seen actual Scrum in practice. Most "Agile" is ScrumBanFall - Business/Finance are Waterfall, Product/Eng follow Scrum in planning work, Business injects customer need, which upsets Sprints, excess WIP happens, everyone is confused, Estimates are f*cked, no one is happy, every is confused - did I say that already, most partially completed work needs to be redone, everyone worked harder, but got less done.
Thanks for the pointers, Ben. Seems this struck a chord with you; or maybe a nerve.