What they don’t tell you when selling packaged “A”gile or teach you in Agile Certification Schemes

“Agile has crossed the chasm”¹, declared Agile Alliance in 2006, implying it is now the mainstream. Indeed it is. Agile is everywhere. The Economist wrote about it more than a decade ago, so is HBR recently & others; attesting its stature as the new management theory worthy of their attention & precious media space. Pilgrimages are now organised to a ski resort in Utah, USA, where 17 wise-men declared the new commandments.

If you started your career in the last ten or fifteen years or so, this thing existed from the beginning of the time. If not, you are promised or expected a great deal — pizzas, beers, white walls, snooze-rooms, openness, honesty and whole lot of others that you haven’t experienced in your previous life. You spent money to become “certified of some sort” or a “professional of some sort”, surprisingly, not both – “a certified professional”. “From today, we are going agile” you or your C-suite declared; “we will be like Amazon, Google or Facebook; and you get your life back” echoed the corporate walls. Consulting firms were hired. They started telling you how to do your job, essentially to do the same, but in a new language. Words are thrown around, fancy ones — sprints, grooming, story points, velocity, burn-downs, hackathons; endless meetings followed them with more esoteric names.

But the reality is — your experience is markedly different. Projects still take years to deliver. Budgets are still set annually with scope & time agreed upfront. Team is then selected to deliver the agreed scope on time. They are told to deliver faster and faster right from day one. Scrum teams are formed. There are Analyst Scrums, Architect Scrums, Development Scrums, Test Scrums, UAT Scrums and so on, each one with their own backlog and Scrum ceremonies. If you are lucky, all these are crammed into two or three Scrum teams — but Architects won’t do a thing until some “design stories” are thrown at them by business analysts. They then handover “build stories” to Development teams. On the scent, comes the turn of “test stories” and so on. Ohh, there is Sprint 0, for sure, with all these folks before they disperse and do their work. Some of you get even luckier, you do a POC (proof of concept) prior to this. But the story is more or less the same after that.

After all that furore, you hope to see the real work in real world — of course, not after each Sprint as the Guide says but at least every few Sprints. Sprints come & go in multiples of ten. Nothing tangible to touch & feel. Well, there are Demos, Show & Tells, Reviews, Retrospectives, but nothing in the hands of real customers. Then you hit the brick wall of “Run & Maintain”. They want couple of dozen documents, few hundred point check list. Everything stays just below production environment, declared “done or done done” by the Dev team. It is so close to ready, but nothing actually reaches the real customers for months.

By then Management gets twitchy. Governance Forums, Review Boards, Readiness Boards, Exec Working Groups are set up, if not already there. They ask for reports. There will be plans to get updated plans. More money gets thrown in to see what’s going wrong. New Consulting Firm comes in to review what first Consulting Firm is doing.

Stephen Bungay in his book “The Art of Action” says

As people failed to do what was wanted — either because they did not understand what was wanted in the first place or because they understood only too well and thought it was wrong — the resulting frustration & suspicion led in turn to call for tighter control. As the initiatives specifying actions increased in number, so did the metrics specifying targets. These gradually gave way to metrics about actions.

Input measures dominated output measures, and in plan review questions about what was being achieved replaced with questions about how things were being done. Senior management spent much of the time creating, discussing, and reviewing measures and numbers. The numbers themselves became very detailed yet divorced from overall goals. Behaviour became driven by targets rather than performance.

For all the metrics, accountability was very diffuse. In the complex matrix, few people are uniquely accountable for anything. However, in the quest to increase motivation & commitment, performance bonuses linked more tightly to specific measures. People object that they were not in control of what they were being measured. They were told to work more closely with their colleagues and get on with it. As distrust grew, so did resentment, and it turned into a sense of helplessness.

Let me restate few key elements:

• From metrics specifying targets to metrics about actions
• From outcomes to outputs
• Numbers become detailed but divorced from goals

Story points, velocity, burn-down, burn-up, DoR to DoD, Cumulative flow, and tens of others — does it ring any bell? It is scientific though, we are rational human beings, we console ourselves. Fibonacci sequence, Statistics, even Quantum Mechanics are in there, what could possibly go wrong?

Business benefits expected are no where to find. The boss of the boss says enough is enough. The power-holder overseeing this transformation gets replaced. New power-holder comes in and declares “we should go agile and here is the new consulting firm who is going to help us”.

With the metaphorical shrug of corporate shoulders, you pause and wonder “What they didn’t tell me when they sold this idea initially”?

If this story sounds familiar, don’t worry, you are not alone. I try my best to clear the fog. To begin with, here are things you weren’t told when this agile idea was sold to you, either in certification schemes or from the fancy presentations of consulting firms:

• Agile is dead, again & again
• Agile (alone) doesn’t scale
• Scrum is Waterfall 2.0
• Imitation doesn’t work 
• There is a magic spell of certification Ponzi schemes

These are pretty big statements, I confess. Anti-agilists, whatever that tribe is, said this from the beginning, I’m the non-believer, you may argue.

Before I move on to my first exhibit, please read my disclaimer

Let me unpack each of the big statements I made above, starting with “Agile is dead”, in my next article