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> corporate watering down of Agile concepts

I think inverting agile concepts is more accurate.



It's very common. When I was working at a USAF base they decided to adopt Lean. What they actually implemented was almost the exact opposite of Lean in every way, almost comically so.

A key element of Lean is empowering the workers to improve the processes. Let them come up with ideas that improve things and run experiments (guided by management perhaps, but not directed by). But the way USAF did it, the managers would watch a process being done, identify "wasted" movement, and then rewrite the process/procedures to eliminate that wasted movement. It was clearly just Scientific Management but being called Lean because they "leaned out" the processes. Naturally, the actual workers did not like coming in every other week and having to learn their job all over again. After a while they still held "Lean Events" but by then it was for show rather than to actually effect change in how things were done.


I once interviewed at a place that told me they did "design sprints", "coding sprints", "integration sprints", and "testing sprints"


Corporate agile looks from a distance like waterfall in a dress if you get my drift.


Once the scrum "masters" start becoming unspoken management, then you know the process has got off the rails and is no longer agile.

Sometimes it makes sense, corps don't actually have any need to churn out new features, at that point you just have kanban, or even waterfall. Be nice to stop pretending, though.




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