Tuesday, May 17, 2022

RANT: Why Scrum / Agile Does NOT Work for non-IT companies

My brain is just hurting right now. I can no longer take just how dumb people are in general. It just boggles my mind how little people just use their brains. And this is why I believe agile just cannot work in non-IT companies.

How to Make Agile Work

Just say you are doing agile. Use agile terminology. Use words like scrum, daily stand-up, retrospective / post mortem, acceptance criteria, etc. Say it with confidence, no one really knows what they mean. And those who do, just speak louder and interrupt them.

Breakdown three month waterfall processes into two week waterfall processes (but call them sprints). You cannot do a TRUE sprint because the other teams are not dedicating to the who agile process. If you need to show delivery, say that QA is taking too long. Deliver quickly with terrible quality. Make sure to blame others for the problems. Worst-case say there was too much scope creep.

Do daily stand-up call, a daily call that is supposed to be 15 minutes as 30 minutes. Don't worry what that means, just say it is a short status call. It is never short nor a status call. It will always go over 30 minutes because there is always someone who does not know how to summarize their status.

Want to be a scrum master? Just say you are one. No need for certification nor all the testing and training. Everyone I worked with who had one are absolutely clueless. Sure some try, but no one really understands. Why because none of them are engineers of any sort. They are just PMs that couldn't make it to be a PM. Or worse, they are engineers or analysts that couldn't make it.

If you want to do something your way, you HAVE to "act" dumber (or be yourself whichever is dumber) than the other person. There is no logic or reason that can persuade the other person especially if the person is actually smart. What persuades a logical person from even trying is to make them think that you are too dumb to be reasoned with. They may say something like "that will save you on step" and you should respond "I want to add a useless comment" but don't say useless... because you have to show the managers that you are doing something even if that something is nothing but you cannot say nothing... so nothing is something. Or, just agree but continue working as if you never had that conversation.

Even if you have the power to persuade people and get them to understand the process, DO NOT DO IT. You are just going to inflate the director's ego. He was just guessing stuff but now that he saw that it works, he will assume that it was all him and will take all credit. And because you were probably the biggest trouble-maker by making people complain that you are forcing them to do stuff, you'll likely get laid-off for being the most unproductive person.

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