How many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Release Train Engineers and Product Owners will be needed to tell the worker bees how to do the work?
23 replies (most recent on top)
Bigger agile teams equates to more levels of worthless management teams.
“Agile” is another word for laziness and unorganized. You will never change my mind.
If it furthers DEI initiatives, I support it!
Give me waterfall over the agile army of master planners working 15 minutes a day.
Are actually in Tech? Since my org switched from Waterfall to full Agile, we complete a ton more work and faster than any big waterfall project. That old big project mentality with huge business/system req documents and lengthy build cycles were horrible. Most of them failed to deliver. We release monthly with more major changes quarterly. We also stood up a process via SNOW with a 3 day turn around for low risk config/parms updates. We have tiny scrum teams (10 people tops) compared to those old fashioned dev teams. Everyone on the team does multiple roles, including SM and PO. No one is a single tasker.
As a business owner we roll our eyes when we hear 2-3 days of PI Planning is needed to get work done. Job security must be nice for the agile army.
As someone with a PMP, who was a long time PM at this bank, I can tell you that the push for Agile and all of its overhead (call it what you want, but its overhead - as detailed in these posts) was not something the majority of folks wanted. Some exec leader read a book - and made all direct read the same book - that praised the wonders of Agile and everyone drank the koolaid. To be clear, there was an industry wide push for Agile already, we just hopped on the bandwagon without thinking about the pros and cons for our business. It was the shiny new toy that would fix everything.
Project Management already had a bad (maybe mixed) rap; all it takes is one bad PM experience for tech & business folks and you never hear the end of how bad PMs are. Just like any role, the value delivered depends on what each individual brings to the table. As a PM, I have worked with plenty of developers, business folks, app manager, etc who SUUCCK, but I have also worked with some amazing, talented folks.
Agile took the above issue and compounded it by breaking out the PM role in to like 8 different roles, each role having its own overhead that teams have to deal with. Add to that: people in these Agile roles who are self important and lack any self-awareness + emotional intelligence = A nightmare.
@1xwy+1pP57FAe it’s simple. We’re an investment bank and we don’t care about the bread and butter work of banking. RM’s can’t get new deals underwritten, who cares, cut more people, raise the threshold on CLU to 10m. These people can barely skate a 2m deal this is an impending disaster in the making. Need more, I don’t have time to tell it all.
It’ the goal of Project STAR….
Stupidly Transform And Regret
I'm having a hard time with why we're slashing actual 'producing' roles so aggressively (CCB RM's have WAY too large of books now) and yet seemingly (from what I've seen on here) there's a HUGE glut of back-office tech mgmt, audit, etc.
The actual bread and butter is working 10hr days and then I see threads like this^ about 1hr workdays. Help it make sense lol.
Agile coaches will tell you Scrum Masters are are required for 15 minutes of work per day..but but the PI Planning 🥴
@1jti LOL! That is a lot of fail but that sums up SunTruist.
Well, women in the workplace need something to do all day. That's why all these pretend jobs exist.
What exactly does a scrum master do all day after their 15 minute standup?
I will say an excellent PO and SM can make a big difference, but 100% needed? No.
I've been engineer, BSA and SM all in one role and it's not fun to have to wrangle all the stakeholders, ask the questions, gather requirements. Show the work to the stakeholder, inevitably they ask where the thing is they never asked for.
On the other hand, it was nice to just walk to the other side of the building, get the feedback, go back to my desk and build it without PI planning, pitch Q&A, refinement, sprint planning, demo, review, retrospective where we talk about work more than doing work.
Worker bee here, with 20 plus years of experience in the hive. Agile isn’t the problem and all of these roles have always existed, albeit by many different names in my time as an engineer. There have always been PO/BA/ solution engineer roles that discovered and defined the work. Also always have had RTEs/Scrum Masters/Project & Program Managers and the like to help manage work and work flows. Generally despised all of the above until I fully understood the value that a functioning team could deliver.If us worker bees could discover,define,design, manage, and build and engineer all at once we would likely be working for ourselves:)
With a big bank comes big regulations. The asset size where the regulators really start digging into the business used to be $250Billion. That number has or will be dropping to $100Billion. Having said that, I do feel like Truist has not been nearly as efficient as some of our Peers.
Tech managers aren't allowed to have secretaries anymore, so now they hire Release Train Engineers instead.
All compliance, audit and enterprise tech for that matter do is create checklists.
Might want to get out of banking bud! That’s kind of how it is for a bank our size!
All compliance, audit and enterprise tech for that matter do is create checklists. Hire checkers who check other checkers and create useless employees and little empires. I’m not sure how Bill and BOD can’t see this. It’s been going on for four years. In the name of regulation we get rid of productive people or in many cases put them in some useless role of yes, creating another checklist and auditing that. It’s called quality control, put procedures in place and have supervision monitor that they are being followed. It really is that simple.
Same with the paperwork theater. When all the issues found are with the paperwork and not the underlying work product it's difficult to understand adding even more paper check points and paperwork specialists.
I think some agile principles are great. That said, I’ve always been suprised at the economy that was created as a result of the onset of it and mass migration to it. Lots of high paying jobs without much of an ROI, IMO.
Those percents aren’t going to report themselves.