The internet is awash in pixels about the trend of “quiet quitting.” Plenty of talented people have sounded off on the subject online. I do not think I can contribute anything more substantive to the debate. Instead, I want to talk about another trend popping up on the web. Many people are talking about poor agile implementations, and I think we need to discuss it.
Agile is a growing paradigm in the business world, and as an early adopter, I have seen a few bothersome trends. Allen Holub on the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel gave some strong opinions about agile and how it is failing organizations. I am an outspoken critic of poor agile implementations and dark scrum, so when I heard Holub bemoan the state of Agile, I found myself chuckling along in agreement about most of the things he had to say.
The first trend is the shift from technology professionals becoming agile advocates to project management professionals advocating agile. It is a standard survival strategy for business people to pivot when they see changes in the market. The cohort of PMP-certified professionals witnessed the changes in the market and then retrained to become scrum masters and SAFe professionals. It is not an alarming trend, but they took the values from traditional project management and business leadership and attempted to dress them up with agile terminology. The effect was the worst of conventional project management combined with the frantic nature of iterative development. Not to over-generalize, but these people are dogmatic and accustomed to enforcing rules instead of the pragmatic delivery of solutions. These people enforce laws and generate outputs, but customer value is an afterthought rather than a central focus.
Next, business leaders feel that their problems will evaporate if they do agile instead of having an agile mindset. Jeff Sutherland points out that agile and scum hold a mirror up to the organization. It is then up to the organization to effect change based on what they see. Often problems are hiding in plain sight. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls this unpleasant part of human nature Unknown-Knows. We can ignore evidence when confronted with it. I have witnessed many business leaders act this way because they cannot effect change or feel the necessary change might impact them negatively. A manager loves the rapid cycle times, feedback, and transparency that agile offers but only sees accountability pushed down to the teams as valuable instead of accountability, which percolates into the organization as part of the agile mindset. I liken the situation to someone who wants to get into better shape but can’t seem to quit smoking.
Finally, the licensing and training for agile professionals are creating what Holub calls “a priesthood that does not understand the scripture they are professing.” I am a big supporter of formal training in the technology business. The pace of change requires any good professional to relearn their job every eighteen months. The proper training and curriculum by the various organizations like SAFe, Scrum.org, and the Scrum Alliance are exceptional at teaching the formal theory of Agile, but in the trenches work of delivering software is often ignored. It creates a situation where people trained in this manner fall back on the processes they were taught instead of concentrating on the individuals and interactions necessary to get work done.
A classic example is my recent interaction with an agile coach with a PMP certification and SPC credentials. This person never wrote a line of software or delivered value to customers. The only experience they had was providing reports to upper management. Suffice to say; they failed spectacularly.
The agile reformation is over twenty years old and is starting to show growing pains as the initial enthusiasts become supplemented with careerists and ticket punchers in organizations. Don’t hate agile; instead, let us hate the people diluting and undermining its effectiveness. I fight that lonely fight each day.
Until next time.
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