Agile isn’t dead, but it doesn’t work for all teams and all companies.
For Agile to work, you need two traits.
The first is you can’t have micromanagement. About as tight as management should get is in a Scrum-based workflow where you typically have a project manager pushing people along for deadlines.
The second is that you need high(er) performing teams. I don’t have any formal education in development other than a Python 2 class from way back and a couple of self-paced development courses, yet as a senior engineer, I’m teaching developers with a formal education how to prevent common errors in their logic, how to properly set up their node/java/python environments, and basically doing all the googling and stackoverflow searching for them. This includes team members who are leads and architects.
My team is about as Agile as you can get, doing something more of a Scrumban workflow, using Scrum in certain projects, but heavily relying on Kanban. Our upper management pushed Agile training on us so they could better track our time and projects. By the time we were done, we were more confused about what Agile was until we took a step back and realized that we had been Agile, management just had a bad expectation of what Agile would do for them.
I would seriously invite everyone to explore the Itamar Gilad Gist framework. It serves as a powerful conduit for supercharging Agile by integrating business goals, ideation, experimentation, and strategic long-term planning. While Agile excels at short-term execution and planning, it often neglects strategy and longer term product and problem space discovery . With GIST, we can harness the best of both worlds—eliminating waterfall planning while infusing Agile with strategic depth.
Insightful read, David! I don’t agile is dead, but I do believe that it was overhyped and many companies didn’t even bothered to look at the agile manifesto and just wanted to use it because others were using it. Agile methodologies and especially Scrum are no silver bullets, they have trade offs that need to be considered based on the context. I really appreciate Basecamp, they’re focused on learning and empowering people, instead of processes.
Agile isn’t dead, but it doesn’t work for all teams and all companies.
For Agile to work, you need two traits.
The first is you can’t have micromanagement. About as tight as management should get is in a Scrum-based workflow where you typically have a project manager pushing people along for deadlines.
The second is that you need high(er) performing teams. I don’t have any formal education in development other than a Python 2 class from way back and a couple of self-paced development courses, yet as a senior engineer, I’m teaching developers with a formal education how to prevent common errors in their logic, how to properly set up their node/java/python environments, and basically doing all the googling and stackoverflow searching for them. This includes team members who are leads and architects.
My team is about as Agile as you can get, doing something more of a Scrumban workflow, using Scrum in certain projects, but heavily relying on Kanban. Our upper management pushed Agile training on us so they could better track our time and projects. By the time we were done, we were more confused about what Agile was until we took a step back and realized that we had been Agile, management just had a bad expectation of what Agile would do for them.
I would seriously invite everyone to explore the Itamar Gilad Gist framework. It serves as a powerful conduit for supercharging Agile by integrating business goals, ideation, experimentation, and strategic long-term planning. While Agile excels at short-term execution and planning, it often neglects strategy and longer term product and problem space discovery . With GIST, we can harness the best of both worlds—eliminating waterfall planning while infusing Agile with strategic depth.
Insightful read, David! I don’t agile is dead, but I do believe that it was overhyped and many companies didn’t even bothered to look at the agile manifesto and just wanted to use it because others were using it. Agile methodologies and especially Scrum are no silver bullets, they have trade offs that need to be considered based on the context. I really appreciate Basecamp, they’re focused on learning and empowering people, instead of processes.