TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches?
Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile.
Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement.
TL; DR: Successful Change, Product Centricity Lessons — Food for Agile Thought #253
Welcome to the 253rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,802 peers. This week, we delve into successful change; we explore self-organization at scale, and we revisit the mantra of the two-pizza teams.
We then listen to the story of a product leader who has to move beyond ‘Agile’ & metrics; we pick up insights from a success story on transitioning to a product-driven organization, and we come back to the adage that ideas are worth nothing, only execution is.
Lastly, we consider whether regarding transitions as products would increase the chances of a successful change.
TL; DR: Resolving Team Conflict, Ikigai & Cynefin — Food for Agile Thought #252
Welcome to the 252nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,787 peers. This week, we analyze options for resolving team conflict; we learn more about our team’s reason for being, and we think about how we are complicit in change fatigue.
We then advocate the unlearning of user stories, and we learn how to rejuvenate user growth by focusing on unlikely user groups. Moreover, we discover another five ways to tackle churn and improve retention.
Lastly, we embrace another help to get a hold on uncertainty and complexity with the Cynefin framework.
Let’s stop guessing and start crowdsourcing data and information on this critical topic: Who is using what metrics under which context to what success? Participate in the agile metrics survey now.
Update 2020-12-14: We have joined forces with empiriks.de, a German consultancy specializing in statistical analysis, and we plan to take the study to the next level. The Agile Metrics Survey already complies with academic standards. However, what we need now is more participants to improve the sample size.
So far, we have more than 750 contributors; let’s strive for 1,000 contributions by the end of January 2021 and aim to publish the report by the end of March 2021!
TL; DR: Scrum’s Nature: It Is a Tool; It Is Not About Love or Hate
Regularly, we find articles from developers detailing why ‘Agile’ in general and Scrum’s nature, in particular, deserve our collective disdain.
What has always struck me in this discussion is its emotionality. Scrum is a tool, useful to accomplish one primary task: delivering value to customers of emergent products in complex environments while mitigating an organization’s exposure to risk at the same time. So, if Scrum is not working in an organization, maybe it is because Scrum is applied to the wrong cause in the first place. Or, that its application has been mechanical, driven by folks who don’t know what they are doing. (Seriously, how hard can Scrum be if the manual comprises of 18 pages, right?)
The question then is: Why would I “hate” a tool unsuited for the intended purpose or applied incompetently? Would I hate a hammer for not being capable of accurately driving a screw into a wooden beam? Probably not, as the hammer wasn’t designed for that purpose, and neither sheer will-power nor stamping with your feet will change the fact.
