Agile pandemic.pptx

Agile is just a fad – By Tushar Somaiya

Tushar is founder, director of ShuHaRiAgile, a premium agile
training / coaching partner and coachingdojo, a unique community
for agile leaders, executive coaches, agile coaches and agile
practitioners to share, learn & network.

Tushar Somaiya is a passionate certified professional coach who
helps executives & teams discover and unleash their true potential.
He believes in a democratic organization & self-‐‑organizing teams.
He calls himself a servant leader. Through his NueroScience based
coaching & consulting, he has helped projects and organizations
turn agile and become truly high performing teams.

He is Results Certified Coach, Certified Transformational Coach,
Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, Certified
System Business Analysts & one of the first 500 PMI-‐‑Agile
Certified Professional.

Tushar has 13 years of IT experience and over 6 years of agile
experience. He is known for his fun-‐‑filled, hands-‐‑on interactive
Placeholder for trainings & speeches at prestigious conferences. His blogs have
CST
been re-‐‑published on ScrumAlliance, AgileAtlas & PMHut. He is
an active volunteer at ScrumAlliance & PMI Mumbai Chapter.

© All Rights Reserved

Inspired By
•  Geert Bossuyt – More Agile
•  Steve Denning –
Agile is not enough – beyond agile manifesto
•  Ravi Mohan – Let the agile fad flow by
•  Christopher Goldsbury – The agile management fad
•  Stop agilizing everything
•  Luke Halliwell – The agile disease
•  Steve Yegge – Good Agile, Bad Agile


What is fad?
Or is it fashion?


Jargon & Consultants
Agile has many


Certiﬁcations & Job Titles
Certifications from external agencies and job titles referring to
the fad.


Big Words & Big Claims
New metrics, internal or external sponsoring departments, big
words and complex phrases


Fad? Yes. Value? ???.
By definition then, agile is a fad. Is there a value in fad itself? Is
there value in agile?


What’s Wrong With Agile?


Danger Of Agile Processes
Doing the easy parts and not the hard parts


Short Comings Of
Agile Manifesto
“Working software over comprehensive
documentation”

Is something I agree with. But this simply encourages people to consider
doing no documentation as valid, which may be dangerous.

“Working software is the primary measure of success”

What about creating & delivering value? Why not measure value
delivered over working software!


Short Comings Of
Agile Manifesto
“Responding to change over following a plan”

Again, the danger is that it gives validity to the idea of
not doing planning at all, which is a common
tendency in the first place.

This manifesto item really misses the point of planning:
the greatest value of planning lies not in the following
of the plan, but in the making of the plan.

In Eisenhower’s words, “The plan is nothing. Planning
is everything.”


Short Comings Of
Agile Manifesto
•  Another principle of agile is “Welcome change”
why not “seek change”?
•  Satisfy customer. Why not Delight Customer?
•  Face-to-face communication. Shouldn’t it be heart
to heart over face-to-face?
•  Evolve design. Evolve everthing!
•  Reflect regularly. Reflect continuously.


MoreAgile Manifesto
Teamwork & responsibility over Individuals and
interaction
Deliver value over Working software
Partnership elaboration over Customer collaboration
Embrace change over Respond to change

While we value the Agile Manifesto, we state that
MoreAgile is more Agile

http://blog.xebia.com/2010/12/23/moreagile-manifesto/


Shortcomings Of Scrum


Daily Standup
•  Having daily stand-up meetings is ludicrous;
•  It exists simply to protect against the dysfunction of
team members that never talk to one another.
•  The Scrum literature goes on about how great it is
that people can’t be blocked by anything for more
than a day because of these meetings.
•  In anything resembling a normal, common-sense
team, people will surely raise blockages with their
manager as soon as they occur and not need to
wait for a daily meeting!


Scrum Master
•  The <barf>Scrum Master</barf>, according to the
book, is “a new management role introduced by
Scrum … responsible for ensuring that Scrum values,
practices, and rules are enacted and enforced”.
•  Could you think of anything more pointlessly
circular? A whole new management role, just to
ensure that the methodology is followed.
•  This is where you begin to see how Scrum is aimed
at badly managed teams.


Sprints
•  The concept of rigidly refusing to change what
you’re doing within a sprint is clearly there to
protect against feeble managers who can’t say no
to their employers even when it’s in their best
interests.
•  Any matured team would loose the sight of sprints
and seek changes even during the sprints to
maximize value and minimize waste just like Kanban
or Lean flow system.


Product Owner
•  Having an assigned person (the “product owner”) to
control the backlog exists purely to combat a crazy
situation where multiple people tell developers what to
do.
•  I guess following Scrum helps these poor souls to stand
up to the rest of their corporation.
•  For the rest of us, it’s irrelevant.
•  If you’re a software product company that ships
commercial software, you’ll already have sorted out
who makes decisions on features and product vision.
•  And wherever you work, if your manager can’t spot this
problem arising and fix it themselves, they’re
incompetent and you have bigger problems.


Scrum Room
•  The “Scrum room” – where all Scrum meetings take
place – is apparently worth a mention in the
process.
•  All this says to me is that the whole process is aimed
at developers who don’t even have a meeting
room with whiteboards.
•  By bringing in a Scrum consultant, perhaps they’ll
get one.
•  But you have to ask yourself: if your employer won’t
give you a meeting room with whiteboards unless a
consultant tells them to, don’t you have bigger
problems?


Do What Is Needed
•  Scott Ambler said

We don’t need repeatable processes we need
repeatable results.

•  What this says to me, is do what is needed to drive
results.
•  Teams need to come together and determine what
will work best to give them the best chance to
deliver results. This is just smart.


Agile Movement
It shook our community and made us all think about how we
were running projects. Brought the focus back on VALUE.


Labels & Fad Still Required
Don’t push for agile over waterfall, push for what is right for the project.
Push for what is right for the business in the short and long term.
Even though I think the word agile is a fad, the agile movement is
definitely a trend.


Good Turned Ugly
Abandon a one size fits all model.
Be pragmatic about everything!!


Avoid Formulaic Response
Avoid one problem – one solution.


Stop Agilizing Everything
Good ideas, tools, and techniques don’t need the word
‘agile’ pre or post fixed to be worthwhile


Solve Real Problems
So turn off the scrum-o-matic. Wipe the agile makeup from
your face, and put the kanban sequin dress away. There are
still some real problems to solve.


Conclusion
Full value has been realized, copied, marketed and redistributed
without concern for the result. Another wave will again crest
and break onto the shores of software management and
leadership delivering only incremental improvement.


Thank You!
Tushar Somaiya,
Founder, Director ShuHaRiAgile,
Subsidiary of QAAgility.
Tushar.somaiya@ShuHaRiAgile.com


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