[HN Gopher] It's time to break free from Corporate Agile
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It's time to break free from Corporate Agile
Author : pcloadletter_
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-02-11 20:53 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bits.danielrothmann.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bits.danielrothmann.com)
| santoshalper wrote:
| Practically speaking, Corporate Agile _is_ Agile in that it is
| what 95%+ of people doing Agile are actually experiencing.
|
| As far as I can tell, the only companies doing "manifesto" Agile
| are startups, mostly out of necessity or out of a preference for
| agility (which is necessary for a startup) over predictability
| (which is impossible for a startup). Large companies mostly fail
| to do Agile not because they are incapable (well, maybe some),
| but because they don't want to - they value predictability over
| agility.
|
| If you're about to reply that your Product/Engineering team is
| totally doing "real" Agile inside a traditional corporate
| operation, save your energy lol.
|
| Now here is my hot take: Any organization that can reasonably
| hope to achieve predictability will strongly prefer it to agility
| and always choose it. This is why Agile never works in
| established corporations. No matter how much they talk a good
| game about "disruption", the reality is that they are just hoping
| to get predictable results.
| tootie wrote:
| I've seen a lot of agile shops and in my experience most of
| them have the right idea and relatively few are really abusing
| it. The friction with any project, agile or not, almost always
| boils down to estimation. "When will my product be done?"
| That's a really hard notion to disabuse regardless of process.
| No methodology has successfully solved for predicting the
| future.
| santoshalper wrote:
| And none ever will, but organizations will keep chasing that
| brass ring.
| convolvatron wrote:
| of course not. but if you don't follow corporate agile, then
| you're allowed to make estimates beyond a single sprint. are
| these prophetic? only in the sense of being self fulfilling.
| we can do is have a rough map of the work and eyeball our
| progress given the team we have, and try to line that up with
| the endpoint by working backwards.
|
| this should give us some general feeling about risk. we have
| lots of ways to repond to perceived risk of failure -
| - pull in a more experienced person to get a read and
| possibly help with that part - shuffle the order of
| development to try to swallow some of the uglier pieces early
| - talk with product (possibly yourselves wearing different
| hats), about whether we can meaningfully throw some work off
| the bus without hollowing out the release - thin out
| some features
|
| and actually probably several more. what corporate agile says
| is 'this is all too hard, screw that, lets not try to account
| for individual strengths, and the nature of the development
| process, and the sensitivity of the markets towards
| particular features. everybody pick something to work on for
| the next two weeks...and if that didn't work. well, we tried
| our best'
| TheCleric wrote:
| You're 100% right. In every case where I've been a part of
| agile, you have someone at the top that's wanting
| predictability. If I told them to pick between 5 guaranteed
| features and 10 features but they don't have control over the
| timing, they'd pick the former every time (well they'd try to
| pick 10 guaranteed, but ultimately they'd rather have
| predictability than velocity).
| opportune wrote:
| Even a startup cannot do manifesto-agile most of the time IMO,
| at least not if they have a strong desire to succeed, because
| they are constrained by the possibility of running out of money
| in the near-future.
|
| I am dabbling with bootstrapping now that I've hit my
| financial-independence targets and I think this, along with
| profitable+small+private+engineering-led software businesses
| and FOSS, are some of the only environments in which you can
| engage in true Agile. That assertion stems from the fact that
| they are not subject to real constraints in budget and
| resilient to business meddling in things like TTM and MVP.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Large corporations are basically run like planned economies in
| communist states. 5 year plans, leadership detached from reality
| on the ground, tons of internal propaganda, lots of pretending
| that things are great, empire building by the mid levels and so
| on. There may be pockets of "true" agile here and there but I
| believe a large corporation simply can't be run in "true" agile
| manner. They are way too controlling to really empower their
| workers.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Communism is essentially corporatism for nation states.
| __loam wrote:
| Does anyone else think it's weird that we have to submit
| ourselves to these little authoritarian fiefdoms or starve?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| No because the desire to know and control what's going to
| happen is primarily driven by finance needs, and they're also
| the people who pay you.
| switch007 wrote:
| Plus ca change.
| esafak wrote:
| You don't! That's the beauty of free-market capitalism.
|
| You can start your own company, or even freelance. And there
| are thousands of companies to choose from.
| lukifer wrote:
| This is exactly why the conflation of "capitalism" with
| "markets" has been such an effective propaganda coup for the
| neoliberal rentiers: while there is often non-zero-sum value
| creation and growth in the short term, it's usually with an
| eye towards long-term consolidation of social power and rent
| extraction (converting flows into capitalized assets,
| representing expected returns and embedded growth
| obligations).
|
| Monopoly, oligopoly, and market power are a feature, not a
| bug, and that includes reducing labor to a commoditized asset
| on the spreadsheet like any other: not only as cheap as
| possible, but as predictable, and as fungible as possible.
| (The extent to which the social power of these fiefdoms is
| not always a means to a "Number Go Up" end, but instead a
| primate drive for status and power merely enabled by rent-
| seeking, is left as an exercise for the reader.)
|
| See "Markets Not Capitalism" and "Capital As Power".
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| The tension is fundamental and comes from a perfectly
| reasonable desire to know how much things will cost, how long
| things will take and what they will get at the end.
|
| Adequately communicating, negotiating and managing the
| uncertainty is the core part of agile, "do what you want" isn't
| going to fly, that's why teams don't have complete agency on
| process.
|
| I agree the politics and "fog of war" in large companies is
| tiresome and wasteful but it seems to be almost unavoidable
| once you get to a certain size.
| opportune wrote:
| Good take. Just want to add that the problem is "how long
| things will take" is always a guess when formulated as a
| single number or date and in reality something more like a
| probability distribution subject to many foreseen and
| unforeseen forces.
|
| That's where the fundamental mismatch between corporate
| planning and Agile lies. Agile is supposed to be resilient to
| known and unknown unknowns, but corporate planning usually
| isn't - as you mention due to very real constraints like cost
| and opportunity costs and so forth. It's why you essentially
| can't do "true-agile" in basically any corporate setting IMO.
| theteapot wrote:
| > ... I believe a large corporation simply can't be run in
| "true" agile manner.
|
| Who was suggesting they could or should be?
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| Agile is a tainted term. For it's proponents, it's become nothing
| more than a vacuous manifestation of the No True Scottsman
| fallacy. Anything that works is True Agile, and anything that
| doesn't is Not True Agile (or would be True Agile if you weren't
| holding it wrong). The principles that underlie Agile are either
| entirely self-evident and can't be claimed as a particular
| benefit of Agile per-se, or they are hopelessly naive about the
| way people, and companies, actually work. Agile itself has no
| real original ideas, and offers nothing of value.
|
| At this point, the best thing we can do is let Agile, all of it,
| die.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Agile itself has no real original ideas_
|
| Core to the 12 Principles, and thus Agile by extension, is the
| idea of no managers. Each of the 12 items exists to get you
| thinking about what developers (and the business people!) need
| to do if there is no manager acting as the guiding force.
|
| While no managers is not a novel idea in a vacuum, it isn't
| something organizations usually think about. It's just the
| unspoken expectation that there will be managers once you have
| enough people to form a team.
|
| _> hopelessly naive about the way people, and companies,
| actually work._
|
| Indeed. One of the 12 principles is quite explicit that it will
| not work with any Random Joe; that you need very specific
| people who are motivated to make an organization function
| without management helping them. Much as you want to pretend
| you are not Random Joe, you are, and it literally tells you
| that it won't work for you.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Every term has that property. If there's a thing called T you
| can say that the good Ts are "real Ts" and the bad Ts are "not
| real Ts". It means nothing to dismiss an idea because of this.
| In the No True Scotsman fallacy, the fallacy is not the
| definition of the word "Scotsman", it's the use of arguments of
| this form.
| CartyBoston wrote:
| In the startup world and in much of the tech corporate world in
| _practice_ predictability is valued above all else. It 's because
| investors, perhaps reasonably, value and therefore demand
| predictions.
|
| But as we know that is fundamentally difficult. So many tech orgs
| make up a "hero-hustle" culture to compensate. "We're top 10% and
| we work all the time, this is the best we can do!"
|
| Strong leadership is strong leadership, building the right
| product development culture is really hard.
| tamimio wrote:
| As a certified project manager myself, huge portion of all these
| practices are just pure none sense and sometimes are used only to
| feed the managers ego and burn the employees more while producing
| nothing but a garbage product. They see it done in an XY big corp
| and they start mimicking it blindly believing that in few years
| they will become mulit-billion dollars company, and I always say
| it, just because some approach worked in an environment with
| these people and that product, it does NOT mean it will work for
| you, it's a tool, it fits that work it doesn't mean it will fit
| yours, but holy crap how ignorant some people are when they just
| apply work without thinking, it is far dangerous than not
| knowing, the former one will think they know it all!
| leetrout wrote:
| Also see the recent post & comments: "The "3 standup questions"
| are terrible and need to die"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317107
| teddyh wrote:
| The idea of "Basic Agile" is not new; there's, for instance,
| "Clean Agile" from 2019.
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