[kenada]

I’ve had good experiences with scrum. I was on a team that was empowered to own and refine its practice. We were able to halve our cycle time and improve sprint planning to the point where we rarely overcommitted. It was great, and it was credited with the successful delivery of a major project.

Unfortunately, our management changed, and we were no longer empowered. The new manager had his own ideas for how things should be done, and that resulted in a replacement process that was worse. We lost the ability to do effective capacity planning and iterate quickly. It was terrible.

That’s really my biggest issue with agile. There’s a big focus on process, but it’s about the people. If the people aren’t empowered, it won’t work. If you’re not iterating and communicating, it won’t work. If someone’s not on board with that, they can sabotage things (intentionally or otherwise).

[Yhippa]

> That’s really my biggest issue with agile. There’s a big focus on process, but it’s about the people

From the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. What you described doesn't sound Agile by the book.

[kenada]

That’s fair, and you’re right. I apologize for being unclear. Perhaps I should have quoted it to reflect that my issue is with what gets called “agile” rather than what the practice is supposed be (and the former seems unfortunately common).

[pillefitz]

What was the replacement process?

[kenada]

The manager would tell people which ServiceNow tickets to work or what project work to do. We went from empowered to micromanaged. Maybe the kinks got worked out eventually, but I didn’t stick around and left after a few months.