Agile has gone from ‘people over process’ to ’no process’

In practice ‘agile’ means ‘we have no process in place and each team does whatever random thing the manager wants to try next’. Sometimes that is SAFE sometimes its SCRUM, usually it’s a combination of different things. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are trade offs. 

The first is standardization. If every team follows a different process it’s difficult to understand what is going on at a management level. Which teams are productive? Which teams are in downward spirals? If you don’t have a standard to judge against you can’t find out. 

Secondly, away team work is much harder. Working with a team that uses the same development process, pipeline setup, programming language and frameworks is easy. On the other hand working in the code base for a team which uses a different language, framework, architecture, etc is very difficult. Not supporting away team work severely limits your ability to integrate internal software components.

Thirdly, Estimates are not possible in this kind of environment. Since the process changes constantly historical data becomes useless. In response to this most companies don’t even keep historical data. The main use for estimates is ensuring that ‘burn down’ charts follow the 45 degree angle managers love. 

Subjective expert predictions are a valid form of estimating software tasks. But if you don’t have historical data to calibrate against estimates devolve into gaming the system. 

When you change how estimates are made, when tickets are considered done and the sprint cadence every 3-6 months there is no way you can have cross company data on productivity. The lack of process empowers management to obfuscate the productivity of their teams. The pursuit of the best process gives technical organizations a great excuse as to why they have no idea if their processes have improved over the last two years or not. 

In this type of environment all judgements have to be made based on subjective gut feelings and corporate politics. You don’t know which VP’s processes are better than the other because neither has any accountability. You don’t know which technical department is more efficient because neither the estimates or logged hours can be trusted. 

‘We’re being agile’ has become the excuse to follow whatever process you want. Instead of ‘people over process’ it has become  ‘no process’. 

Rework book review

I read REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson the founders of basecamp. The book is a series of short 200-500 word ‘sections’ that elaborate on a point. No wasted space or pages full of empty words where the point has already been made. As a result the book flows incredibly well. It is a quick and light read. The ideas in the book are commonsense lessons learned from running a successful small business. A lot of the ideas are shared with agile and the ‘lean startup’ schools of thought. But REWORK is a superior book to the ‘The Lean Startup’. Comparing the two books its clear Hansson and Fried understand the space better. 

A few points from the book stuck with me so I will go over them. 

Don’t write it down

The top customer complaints will come up so often you will never be able to forget them. You shouldn’t need a long list of customer issues, if you are listening to your customers regularly you won’t be able to ignore the top issues. If you get ten customer complaints each day and five of them are the same issue, you know what to work on. 

The myth of the overnight sensation

“And on the rare occasion that instant success does come along, it usually doesn’t last —there’s no foundation there to support it.” — page 196.

I liked this phrasing of the overnight sensation. These days social media constantly spams us with success stories and lavish lifestyles we could be living. But if you are relying on luck to succeed it might not come a second time, and then you don’t have anything left. 

Don’t scar on the first cut

Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. You create a policy to make a common problem easier to solve. Without a policy you have to rely on judgement and escalating up the chain of command. That is expensive, but having a policy takes all the flexibility out of the situation. Don’t create policies unless its obvious that the issue is common and thinking about it is wasting people’s limited time. 

Four letter words

Don’t use the words “Easy”,  “Fast”, etc. Things are rarely done fast or easily. If they could be we would have done it already. Using those words implies things that we probably don’t know. 

Inspiration is perishable

If you want to do something, you have got to do it now. You can’t do it later because you won’t be inspired to do it later.