Prathima's Miles & Milestones

Agile practices when not followed smartly adds a layer of micro-management on top of regular development activities.

It’s not enough just to ‘go agile’ (aka follow agile practices — iterations, stand-ups, user stories, etc). ‘Being agile’ goes far deeper than that — it’s about our mindset and organisational culture; it’s about what we value and how we behave.

• Smart people don’t like to be micro-managed, they hate it.
• If the Scrum Master doesn’t have enough understanding of the technical and business objectives, he or she naturally focus on just managing people and this makes the developer defensive and, the meeting seems to be a time killer.
• When sprints fail, estimates fail, retrospectives gets postponed, deadlines missed for release, production issues, scope creeps, technical glitches, assumptions tend to create a blame game and developers start to hate each other.
• Most people fear failure more than they desire success. Because of that, developers hate agile as it doesn’t fit their context.
• If the developers are not welcoming the change, lack self-motivation and accountability, no amount of new magical agile flavor of the month can help them to reap the benefits.
• People use agile as an excuse for having no documentation. Documentation is important in agile projects, though it is often more focused and condensed. The level of documentation needs to be appropriate to the particular project you are working on and the level of maturity of the team.

“People who hate JIRA, do not really hate Jira. They HATE their jobs” — Anonymous.

P.S. When things are done right, Project Managers and Scrum Masters have the best job on Earth.

Is there anything else to add? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment.