| We also hired some Agile consultants, but a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, it took our C-suite only 3 months to abandon the path of the samurai, erhm, I meant: the path to Agility. 1. The experience The experience with the consultants was really eye-opening. I will try to describe it below. Since day one, without having much understanding of how and why we are organized, the consultants started seeing problems, and, oh what coincidence, they had the solutions for every-single-thing that they noticed. They tried to convince us, in no particular order, that our problems were: - Not following Scrum well enough. That continued until we asked for specifics what part of Scrum we are not following well enough. Surprisingly, they didn't have a ready answer for that and then dropped it. - Not following SAFE. Scaled Agile For the Enterprise sounded good to our C Suite, but the consultants played themselves by saying they can help us implement it. Our management, just like a gazelle seeing an encroaching predator, avoided the trap. - Not having Agile coaches on a fulltime payroll. Guess who is an agile coach that can work fulltime for us? That was easy to see through, our C Suite will turn their nose at anything that implies spending more money, so they were naturally immune to that approach. - Some Miyagi-Do level stuff about communicating better which was a bit fuzzy to me. I guess the Agile coaches have to...communicate better? One can think of that experience as a lesson, and that by communicating badly, surely on purpose, the agile coaches showed us the value of good communication! That is some black-belt level stuff! 2. Cracks begin to show Things started souring in the 3-rd month, when our management started getting impatient seeing any results in performance. Occupying all your engineering teams for days each week surprisingly had the opposite effect on performance that our C-level hoped for. Then management also got wind of the agile coaches' vision of a "perfect Agile company". According to them, to be Agile (capitalization intentional), each of our teams needed to have: - A Product Owner - A Scrum Master (a dedicated person who ONLY does Scrum Master-ing) - Agile Coach - Team Lead (responsible for developers' growth) - Tech Lead (responsible for tech decisions) - Developers, if the budget allows While we had only POs and Developers, with rotating Scrum Master role, with one developer being the Tech/Team lead. The prospect of having to hire more people to fill all these Agile roles spooked our C suite to such extent so they completely abandoned the whole Agile idea and let go of the coaches. And just like that, Agility was not spoken about since. 3. The results Three months later, thousands of $$$ and people spending their time in meetings, the results can speak for themselves: - we have spent thousands of $$$ - people spent their time in meetings Based on what you wrote, I think you will see similar exciting results! Onward to Agility! |