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2 November 2020

The Agile Caveat Nobody Talks About

Agile works. Until it doesn't. A candid look at where the framework breaks down in large, legacy organisations.

Everyone will have an opinion on what it is, which will more often than not, be entirely wrong Everyone will be remarkably familiar with its most famous expected outcome: it (allegedly) makes everything faster

Your boss may or may not know what it is, but it doesn’t matter because either way he/she will want it yesterday

The business (your customers) will not appreciate the enormity of the engineering overhaul that needs to precede any agile implementation, and your IT department will not be able to explain it to them

Project managers will rebrand themselves “product owners”, but they will engage in their daily work in more or less the same way as before

Developers will believe (correctly) that operations doesn’t understand what they need to do this, and so will start taking on ops responsibilities - believing that the work can be “automated away”

Operations will assume (correctly) that giving the keys to the kingdom to developers will create instability, chaos and mayhem

Cybersecurity will not care what anybody wants, and will keep all the keys to themselves

UI/UX designers will spike in demand, because who cares about engineering when my product is so pretty??

Teams will organize a plethora of new meetings like the daily stand up, sprint planning, retro. However, real stakeholders and decision-makers won’t attend because they either don’t have the time or believe that these are all just “working level” meetings

Disclaimer: opinions stated are completely my own and not my company’s