[zwckl]

Really good and nuanced response, thank you. I'm aware that my original post is a bit facetious and in bad faith.

I think my issue really is that a lot of what you're describing feels like it only works in theory, but my experience in practice is that it never works the way it's meant to because the culture to do it just isn't there. There's always a dickhead CEO. There's always one mobile developer who was shoehorned into the team because they nobody knew where to put them, their work isn't really relevant to anyone else on the team, but they're forced to come to all this ceremony that has no relevance to their work. There's always people who treat it like a status update.

Maybe it can work. I'd be interested to hear from somebody who's practised it and had it work well. But I don't think that place exists.

[TomOwens]

In practice, the frameworks don't work out of the box. Take Scrum, for example. The framework described today has had all the original technical practices used by the first Scrum Teams stripped out, with no new technical practices added, and it's been generalized to fit many organizations so it's marketable. There are many questions to ask. Why do I need to have a Daily Scrum every day? If I'm mobbing, do I need a Daily Scrum at all? Why a maximum timebox of a month for a Sprint instead of 5 or 6 weeks? What technical practices do I need to deliver software every day or week? All of these are important questions that would likely result in changes.

The culture is the big thing.

I've only worked in very large enterprises, but I've never had to deal with a dickhead CEO because they push decisions down. I haven't even had to deal with a dickhead business unit VP or director. Decisions are actively made 3 or 4 levels below the CEO. That's almost always at the product level, which could be one level up from a team if multiple teams work on a single product. I've also rarely had to deal with people being shoehorned in because we strive to eliminate single points of failure. That means having at least two people with (or working toward) a given skill set, cross-training, and being willing to work outside their comfort zone. People who stay in their niche and don't work with others often don't last long, by their choice.

So, yes. These things can work. I've done it. But it means you can't follow someone else's script or a canned framework and set of tools. It means having a deep understanding of why a framework has made certain choices around roles and events and what to change to build something that works for you. But it's also cultural change in the organization because agile ways of working are inherently different than predictive methods - they need different relationships and inputs and create different outputs.

[zwckl]

Super interesting, thanks for sharing your side, I appreciate it a lot.