The by far strongest correlate of a complete clusterfuck of a project is how often, per meeting, agile is invoked.
In fact, I've discovered you can use agile as a sort of meeting hand grenade, if you don't like the direction a meeting is headed, like they're about to decide on something stupid, you can just throw in "wait, is that agile though?" and the rest of the meeting will discuss methodology, never arriving at any sort of conclusion.
Yea. I do Fractional CTO consulting and usually have good results with developers because I focus heavily on removing bottlenecks, unhelpful processes and meetings, etc.
The challenge is always when you run into sacred cows from other levels of management.
- Hard deadlines while acknowledging we don't have enough information to commit to those deadlines
- Story points as a measure of time
- Absolutely overloaded teams being asked to deliver new features without being given time to improve underlying issues in the system...and then having to constantly stop what they are working on to deal with production issues caused by those underlying problems.
It's like clockwork sometimes and the conversations are always hard.
So kind of like the stereotypical communist meetings where they spend all their time in meetings debating each other and obsessively discuss the finer points of socialism instead of ever accomplishing anything.
My team were employees. But the PM and several developers all came from a Canadian consulting firm. We were being project-managed from the outside. And any time some piece of functionality needed to be added, the new boss kept asking, "Why don't you just use a stored procedure for that?"
In the end, the boss decided to just fire everybody and replace us with Oracle stored procedures. Not even kidding, this is not a "things that didn't happen for $400, Alex".
In fact, I've discovered you can use agile as a sort of meeting hand grenade, if you don't like the direction a meeting is headed, like they're about to decide on something stupid, you can just throw in "wait, is that agile though?" and the rest of the meeting will discuss methodology, never arriving at any sort of conclusion.