People hate Agile at Wells. It is a bit of extra work for grunts but I think is really necessary for management to steer the direction of the firm. Can someone tell me why agile is so bad?
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We aren't even close to doing agile correctly.
They apparently aren't "better together", so that's enough. Viva la Resistance.
Agile is not setup for cross functional teams involving many products and cross dependencies which is every large program at Wells. Snow ball effect goes unnoticed and the roadmaps are easily adjusted not because objectives or priorities shift but because the work isn’t integrated. Break everything down to small increments for velocity optics and constantly change it is the agile way.
Not just WF, but most of the fall-out from Agile hits production support teams. Cr*p code gets deployed without thinking things through (despite countless meetings, reviews, levels of approval). Business needs to appear to earn their keep, so they try to push their priorities through, and tech teams are not allowed to interfere with that--just keep shoveling **** into production.
Agile focusses on the wrong things. Stakeholders primarily want to know two things: 1) When will the work be done, and 2) How much will it cost. Agile fails with both. Additionally, Agile fails with tracking risks, accountability, and coordinating work across multiple teams.
Let’s circle back to that, right? I have to jump to another meeting.
Looks like agile inflation is real
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@1cco, there's an org that has "standardized" story points and is assigning time to each point value so that they can define how many story points each person on each of the scrum teams should be doing each sprint.
IMO that is sooo anti-agile, but sooo like WF. Story points were devised because it is inherently difficult to put time onto work effort (stories.) But people can generally tell you how much bigger something is, in reference to something else. What does WF do? They eliminate any value derived from Story Pointing and make it into a waste of time activity.
Add to that, every WF manager who thinks that velocity should be increasing each sprint and/or can be compared to another team's velocity. "Scrum Team A, there's clearly a problem here. You're only doing 10 story pts each sprint and Scrum Team B is doing 2000. Clearly you're slacking." No Ms. Manager. Scrum Team B has figured out that you only care about the number of points they complete, not the amount of work they actually do. Their 2000 point story is actually the same size as our 10 pt story. And no problem, we'll increase our team's velocity - next sprint, we'll score that same size story 20 pts. Problem solved. We're magically completing double the work we did last sprint. And to prove we're really improving, we'll score that same story 30 pts the sprint after that.
Upper management cited how Agile was to empower employees to be able to make decisions on their own.
Instead it is being used for micromanagement and soon will be used for full accounting of our time and performance.
This is not what Agile was developed for.
A substantial amount of the work done in the context of Agile (basic application development and maintenance) aren't even compatible with the so-called user-story formatting.
Even when the work is suitable for this kind of formatting, the stories are prepared so poorly it's laughable and barely useful for the developer or the tester who theoretically would be testing it.
If they completely disband the project management group as they did at CapitalOne, then it will become better. Then move the scrum masters under the Engineering group.
Thoughts?
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More tech people would be leaving en masse if voluntary term packages were rolled out. There's a lot of older workers who are ready to go.
Agile itself isn't bad. WF implementation of Agile is. Agile is supposed to be flexible so that a team can tailor the basic Agile structure to fit best with what their team needs to be successful.
Instead, WF has made Agile so rigid with their "rules" and standardization and "lockdown" of Jira that it's impossible to actually "be Agile" here. You want a shorter or longer sprint? Nope. You get 2 weeks because that's what WF has decided you get - who cares if that works for your team or not. You want to do Kanban? Okay well use the swimlanes we've dictated to you. Doesn't work for your team? Tough. This Jira plug-in would help you get work done? Can't have that - but you can have the one or two that we've approved. Every time new functionality to Jira is rolled out, we're like starving people getting a piece of bread. We're so hungry for anything to make it better that we're happy with whatever non-useful enhancement we get.
The result is doing a lot of overhead to pretend we're Agile while actually achieving no benefit from it.
Management keeps changing the agile teams so no one on the teams know their assigned systems.
Developers are supposed to be learning the new systems they were just assigned, learning agile, learning automation testing and getting certified in cloud all with less help and getting reprimanded if not keeping up the agile stats of earlier team members that had years of experience and heaven forbid if they have production issues.
Procedures keep changing so what was most important last week is at the bottom of the priority list this week and that comes from exec mgmt.
Add in the extreme complexity of getting code approved to be deployed to production. There are more resources hired just to create red tape than actual developers doing the work.
I am surprised more tech people have not left WF.
The use Agile so one of the exec's could get a nice kickback for purchasing Jira.
Wells wants to keep the command and control hierarchy, reporting, and micromanagement while doing agile. You can’t have both
Taking one method and slamming it across all areas of technology requires time to thoughtfully roll it out. Not all tech roles are in software development. At the present state all I have experienced from Agile are the tools (ServiceNow, JIRA) but no real formality to the methodology. Heck I can't even think of one person or team where I can reach out and make sure my approach to work each day is using the Agile mindset.
I believe tech overall has ba----dized the methodology as a way to lower costs to such a degree that we are simply reduced to being drones with tasks to do. We are being micromanaged by the simplest of tasks too. Gone is any creativity, innovation, design, strategy.
It seems great for those around me who don't question the company and their motives, they simply like being busy, checking boxes, being a good at paperwork.
Agile itself is not bad, like everything WF implements, implementation is bad.