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Reading over his points make me think the OP is a PM who doesn't understand Agile nor his role in it. The number of misconceptions he presents reads like someone who has never bothered to research agile, but only knows what consultants have taught him. I think the number 1 misconception is the sprints. He seems focused on 2
weeks as being the requirement, when it's on the recommendation. Some team have gone as long as 4 weeks. The whole point to a sprint is that dedicated time to a delivery with fast feedback from the customers. It's mainly so you can fail early, ail often. It's much better to spend 2-4 weeks building the wrong product than 6 months. Second, his claims that product development, research and design, and architecture don't belong in a sprint are also misinformed. The focus on user stories to remind people that they need to focus on users, not gold plating. In any technical project, there are a plethora to improve on the design. People can (and have) sat down and refactored and "rearchitected" for days and days. At the end, they build beautiful systems that don't offer any advantage to the customers, or have implemented a number of features the customer didn't want, or have fixed a series of concerns the customer wasn't concerned with. There is give and take of course, as the engineers needs to give feedback to help the customer understand the benefits of the feature or risks of not fixing the issue, but those need to happen first before people go off and construct digital masterpieces. Third, micromanagement. If you have endless meetings in agile, you're definitely not doing it right. The 3 big meetings, planning, retrospective, and demo, are ones that take the most time. Standups take no more than 15 minutes. The other tasks, meaning, backlog grooming and prioritization should not involved your sprint team. Those need to be done offline by the product owner. Agile may be about teams, but you still need strong leadership. The only point of his that has any relevance is the last one, where consultant firms have made big bucks spinning out variations of agile because people just can't understand how simple it is. |