Shockingly, the engineering team still cares about the product and customers! In fact, their biggest complaint is that they aren’t allowed to fix bugs and make small improvements which will benefit the thousands of paying customers they already have.
That is exactly the reason why AGILE/SCRUM fails. The team gets prevented to create out good products and get demoralized. In the end no one cares anymore and look out for another company.
Yeah. One thing that I fear is that various people care more about being able to say that they are doing Agile/SCRUM because it is seen as the proper way of doing things, there is pressure from others to use it (especially if there were problems with their previous way of doing things), or being able to write it in their CV; than caring about it actually helping or being a good approach for the problems they face. I believe that there are some cases where (modified Agile/SCRUM) is good or great (in part because the methodologies tend to take credit for old techniques and methods that existed before these methodologies...), but you have to continuously evaluate whether it works well in the long run and do predictions and root cause analysis, and you absolutely MUST adapt and change it (a lot if necessary) to fit your case.
At the end of the day, employees are hired and paid to help the company succeed, and preferably succeed a lot or more, and thus that is the basic goal for a professional developer. And that is why it makes me extremely suspicious when some of the SCRUM consultants and similar talks about the advantages for developers, about how it "empowers you", instead of how it would help the developers and others do a better job. And I don't even recall any arguments where numbers and cases that shows how developers would perform better or the products or services were improved over time with more functionality over time than expected and better defect rate, etc. The marketing is extremely off.
2 comments
0 u/roznak 11 Aug 2018 19:17
That is exactly the reason why AGILE/SCRUM fails. The team gets prevented to create out good products and get demoralized. In the end no one cares anymore and look out for another company.
0 u/notenoughstuff [OP] 11 Aug 2018 19:38
Yeah. One thing that I fear is that various people care more about being able to say that they are doing Agile/SCRUM because it is seen as the proper way of doing things, there is pressure from others to use it (especially if there were problems with their previous way of doing things), or being able to write it in their CV; than caring about it actually helping or being a good approach for the problems they face. I believe that there are some cases where (modified Agile/SCRUM) is good or great (in part because the methodologies tend to take credit for old techniques and methods that existed before these methodologies...), but you have to continuously evaluate whether it works well in the long run and do predictions and root cause analysis, and you absolutely MUST adapt and change it (a lot if necessary) to fit your case.
At the end of the day, employees are hired and paid to help the company succeed, and preferably succeed a lot or more, and thus that is the basic goal for a professional developer. And that is why it makes me extremely suspicious when some of the SCRUM consultants and similar talks about the advantages for developers, about how it "empowers you", instead of how it would help the developers and others do a better job. And I don't even recall any arguments where numbers and cases that shows how developers would perform better or the products or services were improved over time with more functionality over time than expected and better defect rate, etc. The marketing is extremely off.