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I'll give you one from personal experience, and it was in an academic setting. My boss, whom I will call Boss W (who spent a lot of time maneuvering people around) had first worked for my previous boss, Boss F. Boss W, I think, spent more time playing chess than anything else. First he worked out a situation where he was peer to Boss F, then, with another coup, managed to get Boss F working for him.. Still not satisfied, he managed to change to whom the department reported to from Uberboss J to Uberboss C. Uberboss C, who was peer to another administrative type, Administrator W, was eager to prove the value to the change. And so I was tasked with developing a product rather similar to something that Administrator W had at his previous job. The product itself was politics, in that it presented to a group of stakeholders about a thousand to three thousand items to decide the disposition of. But this was futile, really, because we had about six hundred thousand items to have reviewed, so we would never actually get anywhere with presenting this to the stakeholders. But they wanted it and so ... And so I was told that this was going to be an Agile thing, and I had until the start of the semester to have it done, and they needed to see a fully-featured prototype (a contradiction) right away. Although promised, I never got to meet with the internal stakeholders who would present this product to the external stakeholders who would do the disposition. That's quite a tight deadline, but it gets interrupted because to prove value to someone else, I get sent on a week-long conference doing something utterly unrelated. They just wanted to prove to the guy running Dept B that they were going to have someone in the mix for his technology. Despite this and catching a tremendous cold, I managed to have something developed by the start of the semester, because it was so very very urgent. And then it was not shown to the internal stakeholders for seven months. All o that hustle! So Agile much wow. |