| I used to think that the words you mention are the problem causing so much bureaucracy. My thinking has changed such that I don't blame the vocabulary, instead I blame the people who abuse it. There are genuine people who use these buzzwords you mentioned because it makes it easier to discuss concepts/aspects of project management. It's faster to say "user story" than to say "an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system" (from Wikipedia), or to describe all the additional context that "user story" evokes in a person. You're right that concepts can be misused and end up in a totalitarian environment. That's because the people at the top want it that way. In my experience, they don't want to (or can't) dive into the context of all of their teams and prefer to seek a one-size-fits-all approach. At my last job there was a new CTO hired about a year before I got there and he started a Scrum initiative on the whole organization. They hired a PMO (Project Management Officer) and a slew of Scrum Masters. Half of the Scrum Masters I worked with were genuine people who wanted to help their teams and knew that by-the-book Scrum wasn't going to work. Those Scrum Masters left within a few months because they kept being told to force policies that were doomed. People argued, but the CTO and PMO didn't budge and problems never got addressed. If you ever create your own company and you want to prevent bureaucracy, I think focusing on vocabulary will not be very effective. Focus more on keeping your ego in check, constantly push flexibility, and test the unusual ideas of your workers. However, if you have run-away success, any of your own attempts to wrangle bureaucracy will be hampered by size. Delegating anti-bureaucracy could be hard (and counter-intuitive). |