[andrei_says_]

But isn’t it the managers’ implicit goal to make it as predictable, modularized / interchangeable as factory work and workers.

the Agile Industrial Complex realized they can sell that vision to managers, despite it being unachievable.

That promise is so alluring, it’s blinding.

[mathw]

My company have mandated that my team use sprints, despite us having previously proved that sprints are a bad way to handle our workload (we used a kanban-like system for a glorious year or so and we were actually way more productive in a measurable manner, and also a lot less annoyed). The reason? Predictability.

Except you can also measure that we're not hitting any predicted goal times, ever, because our sprint system is incompatible with the nature of our work supporting live systems and simultaneously developing new features. We're regularly taking on work from outside the sprint half an hour after sprint planning, because something exploded and we're the ones who have to fix it.

It's completely impossible, but the vision of predictability has blinded management.

The number of times there's a card on the retro board under "Stop doing" that just says "sprints" on it...

[andrei_says_]

I believe this has to do with managers being required to constantly estimate cost, time, and ROI with precision, minimizing risk.

I like Basecamp’s shape up methodology: make bets of efforts that are worth 6 weeks of the team’s time, commit to the best one, timebox it. If it takes longer than 6 weeks, throw it away. This way the risk is limited to six weeks.

Few managers would be willing to stake 6 weeks of a team’s time though.

[webmaven]

> I believe this has to do with managers being required to constantly estimate cost, time, and ROI with precision, minimizing risk.

Well, they think they're minimizing risk, but at best they're just minimizing uncertainty, and the result is predictably low productivity.