[hinkley]

It's funny that my anecdote also comes from a kanban team, but amongst mostly waterfall people and one Scrum nutjob.

When you are showing people up they throw the book at you. Yes you're getting a lot done but you're cutting corners so that's cheating! In an org that is perpetually behind schedule they rely on one team being a scapegoat for why all the other teams are behind schedule, and when your team has never been more than 10 days behind it stings.

One of my proudest moments on that project was when I figured out a judo move to meet (and exceed) the documentation requirements for our part of the project with less than 3 man hours per milestone after I got it working (and half of that was typesetting fixes by one of our tech writers). I got the impression that the person who called it out was really hoping it would cost us 20-60 hours per milestone. I think I spent about 30 hours total, including the initial set up time for the tools and templates. So their gambit only worked for a single milestone and then it was back to the races.

[specialist]

> Yes you're getting a lot done but you're cutting corners so that's cheating!

Yup.

Merits of Agile aside, I don't recall any of the project/product management books preparing noob me for the organizational (and personal) psychology stuff.

As you surely know, this is what the gray beards mean when they say most challenges (obstacles) to shipping software are not technical.