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Should Executives Be Embracing Agile Principles Too? (forbes.com) 116

Posted by EditorDavid from the good-for-the-gander dept.
Steve Denning was director of knowledge management at the World Bank from 1996 to 2000, and now consults with organizations around the world on management and innovation. And in 2018 he wrote the book The Age of Agile. Now he's arguing in Forbes that "As the global coronavirus crisis is forcing many organizations to act with unaccustomed speed, organizational agility has suddenly become a necessity.

"The crisis is also making obvious that institutional agility means much more than having lots of agile teams scattered around the organization." "To create a truly agile enterprise," as the article, "The Agile C-Suite", by Bain consultants Darrell K. Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez in the May-June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out, "the top officers — most, if not all, of the C-suite — must embrace agile principles too." Agility of course isn't new. What's new is to see the C-suite embracing it.

The contrast in stock market performance between firms that have been embracing Agile principles at the senior level for a number of years — such as Microsoft and Amazon — and two firms that have spurned Agile principles at the senior level — such as GE and IBM — is dramatic...

It is important that Harvard Business Review is highlighting the role of the C-suite in business agility. Wall Street has already got the message. Although the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8% annual rate in the first quarter and suffered from 30 million unemployment claims, the stock market finished its best month in years. Why? The answer to the paradox is simple. After a devastating collapse the previous month, investors poured into the "chosen few." Firms that have demonstrated business agility by taking advantage of technological possibility — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — have become the largest and fastest growing organizations in the world, while many others struggle.
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Should Executives Be Embracing Agile Principles Too? More

Should Executives Be Embracing Agile Principles Too?

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  • well if it just means that they know what's going (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @03:48AM (#60019882) Homepage Journal

    well if it just means that they know what's going on then sure.

    like if they were up to speed on to which subcontractors the mid level execs are building golden beds to jump into from the large corporation.

    no need to call it agile though. it's just called normal competent leadership, which can be hard to find of course when top level execs have learned to hide from all responsibility and executive decisions while still money from the company regardless of the companys performance.

    (the faut for all of this is at the shareholders and the board, of course, because they hire people with such high salaries that they don't actually need to care about if they succeed in their job or not because they're set for life after 1 years salaries and bonuses regardless)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Agile for me have just been slowing down things - now everything shall be broken down into "sprints" and only a certain number of issues are permitted to be handled during a sprint - no flexibility to adapt to reality.

      The administrative overhead has increased instead of decreased while at the same time the traceability to why changes and new development is made is completely lost.

      In addition to this there are no longer any "checkpoints" that allows things to be in a stable state so that everything ties toge

      • Agile for me have just been slowing down things - now everything shall be broken down into "sprints" and A) only a certain number of issues are permitted to be handled during a sprint - B)no flexibility to adapt to reality.

        That is nonsense.
        A) when you are done with the allocated items, you do others. Hint: you planned your sprint wrong. That is. a lesson to learn!!! Obviously you do not learn.

        B) wrong again. Agility - hence the word - is all about flexibility.

        No idea were - and why - you learned such nonsen

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          This is all from the experience I have had at one workplace, especially when it comes to cross-team functionality.

          Some of this is basically caused by not understanding that each team have to coordinate their efforts to create a solution.

          Even worse is that the teams haven't completed their "paperwork" at the end of task assigned so that when it's pointed out that the documentation isn't consistent then they always come back and say "we don't have time for that".

          • so that when it's pointed out that the documentation isn't consistent then they always come back and say "we don't have time for that".
            Has nothing to do with agile or not ... again.

            Or would they have time to do the documentation in a waterfall process?

        • That is nonsense.
          A) when you are done with the allocated items, you do others. Hint: you planned your sprint wrong. That is. a lesson to learn!!! Obviously you do not learn.

          B) wrong again. Agility - hence the word - is all about flexibility.

          No idea were - and why - you learned such nonsense when it is common sense that it is opposite around.

          And most of all the "Not My F-ing Problem" mentality did arise at the same time to unseen levels.
          Then your team sucks. Has nothing to do with agile or not.

          I'm surprised everyone has not already become sufficiently tired of this bullshit that anyone still feels they can get away peddling tired and lame "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" excuses.

          Agile itself is an anti-pattern. Something only competitors and coding sweat shops should partake in. Those who care about succeed don't waste their time with abstract ideology. They create processes tailored to success of individual missions.

      • Agile is a massively mixed bag and it really does depend on the expertise and experience of the project manager.

        If you have a shit project manager, agile just turns the shit into agile shit. If you have an excellent project manager, agile can really help to clarify processes and give coders a bit of a better chance to code properly.

        For me the big insight I've gotten is that it isnt REALLY about getting the process right, but rather having a process at all, and frigging sticking to it. But its got to be the

      • Yep. My conspiracy theory: agile basically gets endorsed by management when they get jealous that devs only have meetings 1-2 times a week. If you go with sprints and retros, planning meetings etc then all the devs get 11 or so meetings biweekly one if them the majority of a day. The senior guys at least get the backlog grooming and the majority of the prep work for meetings. End of the day you go from spending 5% of your time to 30% of your time in meetings. Then everyone has an excuse why development has

    • At my company, Agile leadership means that whatever shiny thing the boss sees becomes the new highest priority. His thought processes are a wonder to behold.

      We go from "Not a feature that our customers care about" to "My ideas are unquestionably true - I'm a businessman" in the span of not more than an hour.

      Even less time if there is a YouTube video involved. Bonus points if it's a video from a failed company doing related work. In that case, it's still the boss's idea, and we're innovating by trying to

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GlennC ( 96879 )

      ... if it just means that they know what's going on then sure.

      To me that's the essence of Agility; that Senior Leadership has established a clear goal and direction that is openly communicated to employees at all levels.

      If the C-level people don't have that understanding, and if they aren't working with their Directors to help their organizations see the overall goal and how they can contribute to achieve that goal, then Agile is nothing more than "yet another cargo-cult."

    • The problem is often management thinks they have to be involved in decision making.

      Companies try to hire the best and brightest that they can afford. Only to second guess their opinions and do thing the way that they had done it before.

      For some reason there is this expectation that the Boss knows more than the employees. This isn't the case, good bosses know that their employees know more than they do, if they don't they will still pretend that the employee knows more.

      Lets use a software development shop

  • That seems to work rather well, assuming that's what this article is about.
    (Note to self: RTFA! :)

    • Musk at Tesla: tweet random shit constantly and keep social media presence at the forefront of company business. Need cultists to keep stock price up. Except when we need it down briefly. Make random decisions about things that don't really matter like which video game goes into next OTA release.

      Musk at SpaceX: stay out of the way of real scientists and engineers because there's no silly consumer tech involved. Space ship does not use dog mode or automated windshield wipers. Space is unforgiving of bul

  • In my experience... agile usually waterfall (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @04:23AM (#60019914)

    Agile usually collapses to waterfall.

    The Goal.... isn't clearly defined. Attempts to get a clear goal are resisted by management.
    The Time... is abused. Sprints are extended because "an important feature needs to be in this sprint".
    Responsibility... every team member is responsible for their actions-- and all the extra actions assigned to them... and trying to help meet the Time which is being abused. And they dont give estimates-- the estimates are dictated to them by management and the sales force.
    Cooperation and Transparency... is usually there tho. This part seems to work and should be used.

    ---

    In my opinion- as a retired manager for a fortune 100 company that lived thru failed agile and failed SAP $100 million plus projects...
    a) people were overworked.
    b) deadlines were dictated.
    c) sprints or iterations were not time boxed.
    d) too much low risk construction work was done early
    e) stakeholders were *ignored* (and I'm talking multi-million dollar customers who finally started leaving which lead to the project failures-- the customers would *NOT* go to the new products.)

    I prefer Rational.
    1) FINISH *ALL* high risk work before allowing anyone to start on a single line of low risk construction work.
    2) Feature focus contract.
    3) But you still need management support for time boxing (we had it)
    4) GOOD built in documentation

    And I prefer "pattern" based documents. Much more concise and less ambiguous.

    https://www.ibm.com/us-en/mark... [ibm.com]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    It was much lower risk. You didn't spend $80 million on a project that would *never*work.
    Every month you had a working copy for the actual users to test.

    But- seriously- do the high risk stuff (new tech, communications, database and network I/O bandwidth) whether you are in AGILE or Rational or even waterfall. That way, you only sink $500,000 before finding out what you want to do is impossible.

    (and I'm no fan of IBM. They are really abusive of their employees IMHO. I would *never* work there. But they were not as abusive
    as deloitte and douche.)

    • Oh yes.
      If you don’t do the high risk stuff first, you can easily run into a showstopper. You must kill the dragons before proceeding with the quest!
      Proofs of concept for each of the high risk items is indeed crucial. Pretty can come later. Pretty isn’t easy, nor quick, but it can always be done.

      In my experience, agile tends to collapse into institutionalised micromanaging, which is beyond horrible.

      • Aye and the problem is the sunk cost fallacy. "We've spent $100 million and you said this project was 80% complete! We can't cancel it now!" But you finally got the actual key product from the vendor-- and it doesn't work as advertised. the project shouldn't have even *started* until that product was available to test.

        • The point of Agile is to be able to deliver, measure, refine, and then re-run the cycle.

          It has taken (is taking) years for the engineering disicplines to get their head around the benefits of this.

          The benefits of this cycle *to business* should be even more obvious to the "Executives" in terms of generating a business product that can be adapted to changing business needs.

          But it doesn't get treated with respect because big business still reports to shareholders on quarterly and annual results - and the shar

          • Agile principles are not in and of themselves, to blame, we'll agree. Instead, one needs to look at Microsoft and others that have employed them and ask the real questions of: Do you want to be a bullying monopoly, largely impregnable, even by the courts, making dreck but selling it quickly and for high margins, while putting velcro around new product development?

            Money making machines, and especially self-perpetuating ones, seems a lofty goal. The problem with this idea, and all the oil-well-in-the-basement

            • Agree. Anything taking longer than a sprint length to do gets thrown out. Need two weeks to research a new tool which you might not even end up using? Sorry that's 2 sprints. We can break it up but then you are making bs documents like "research report part 1" as deliverable so you can deliver "customer value".

              Sometimes things are just chores that have to be done that may or may not ever land in anything a customer will see. Engineering isn't science since it is more formally a way to build stuff for the mo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            See, I would argue that 'agile' resonates really well with shareholders, to the point it might not be a good idea. Agile is all about short term thinking, and shareholders respond really well to 'so how did you do THIS quarter?', with investment in anything longer term being boring and unprofitable.

          • Another problem we saw was that very powerful executives can (for a short time) literally redefine reality, success criteria, and terms.

            For example... for the SAP project- everyone *knows* if you want to succeed, you remake your business to fit SAP and you *DO* *NOT* customize SAP.

            So instead of "customizations" we had over 1,000 "gap fills". Some of them *literally* re-implemented built in SAP features.

            The executives thought they were clever since they hadn't customized code- only filled gaps. Total fail

      • Re:In my experience... agile usually waterfall (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @08:44AM (#60020266) Journal

        And some things just can't be broken into sprints; Some things are so interrelated you can't break them up that way. Some things involve matter-bashing, so you can't make pieces of the thing and have a functional product that slowly improves over time - you either have the product or you don't.

        Some things have to have an entire design and analysis complete before you can start implementation.

      • We use Scaled Agile ... SAFe . Yes, if you don't have your work actually developer ready,,, If there are unknowns treat them as spikes until the they are known.. If you fail either of these, it turns into waterfall with daily scrums and two week iterations into oblivion! Not sure how this would translate into a room of PHB's ( pointy haired bosses).

    • Why is management always so resistant to setting firm goals?

      To me it always reads like a willingness to escape consequences of their choices, combined with some lack of willingness to devote limited resources to choosing rational or achievable goals.

      The unwillingness of management to commit to anything and accept responsibility for it has long been one my biggest frustrations, especially when they abuse the ambiguity of their commitments to punish workers for actions they took without much clarity of guidan

      • Because, just like you, they don't want to get fired. Since they can't directly control output quality or pace, the only option to guarantee continued employment is create a situation where it is impossible to determine if they have succeeded or failed and to what degree.

      • Why is management always so resistant to setting firm goals?

        The primary reason is quarterly report goals. Execs are wedded to having good news every quarter so they can be assured their bonus remuneration is safe.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The Time... is abused. Sprints are extended because "an important feature needs to be in this sprint".

      I like to explain this way: You can get an aribitrary number of features in an arbitrary amount of time by just coding away and hoping for the best. But for practical project management you want to fix one or the other, you either pick a set of features you want and let the schedule vary or you pick a time box and let the scope vary. If you keep changing back and forth then neither the schedule nor scope is predictable, because you're not going to get rid of the uncertainty either way. The point of time box

    • As a retired chief architect from a Fortune 30 company ... I totaly F@#&ing agree!
      • As a semi-retired PM who watched a company with a wickedly haphazard waterfall culture stupidly try to execute a cold-turkey switch to Agile, I also agree.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )

      Thanks - this is the kind of comment that keeps me returning to Slashdot.

      And I prefer "pattern" based documents. Much more concise and less ambiguous.

      What would you say are good examples of this, or of these writing guidelines?

    • Never heard of "Rational", but that looks like an agile way of doing things.

      • The primary differences are enforced documentation by the tool and high value set on identifying and then resolving all known risks before beginning *any* safe "construction" work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Agile requires a lot of things to go right at the same time. It's not forgiving of bad apples and dysfunctional managers or organizations. Check-lists and reminder memos are often not enough to fix riff-raff. Therefore whether it works at a given org is a crap-shoot.

  • Successful C-Suite has always been "agile" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Successful C-Suite executives have always been "agile".

    The term "agile" however has now been co-opted by technical people who prefer not to plan and instead figure "we can just replace it all in the next release".

    So, no, competent C-Suite executives still don't replace long term planning with a two week sprint and whatever the last user asked for.

    However, a competent (and most are not) C-Suite executive can and will make a multi billion dollar decision in response to rapidly changing conditions without exte

    • But rapid analysis and change to real world is exactly the point of those two work sprints by the technical people. If management is dictating I need all this by this far future date with their crystal ball that is when the nonsense of just small waterfalls in agile clothing begins.

    • It sounds to me like selection and confirmation bias.

      Develop new management strategy.

      Use case studies of existing successful enterprises to point how many were actually using elements of the new strategy. Ergo, new strategy is already proven successful because successful companies have been engaging in it already.

      Seldom, if ever, are failed companies studied for presence of these "new strategy" components and whether they contributed to the company's failures. Even if they are, they are prone to be cherry

  • Pointy Haired Bosses have been droning on about agility as long as I have had a career, although the word used for it keeps changing. They have demanded it from everyone except themselves.

    • As far as anyone else can tell, Agile is synonymous with, "fuck requirements, just build stuff the customer wants," where, "what the customer wants," is synonymous with "idea the PHB themselves had in the shower while drunk,"...

      And you are never going to an actual set of requirements--just a bunch of flak because what they dreamed up isn't even internally consistent, let alone useful. But the vague notion sounded really, really Awesome and Next Level.

      Customer requests get totally ignored.

      Yeah, they should a

      • If you are doing it wrong, yes. If right it is building something small but done for what it is in couple weeks. Actually getting a real McCoy to tell if that actually is good or useless. Doing per feedback more of that or cutting the loss and changing it up for next two weeks. Repeat till you have an end to end product.
  • This seems to be about capital A Agile. Apparently Agile is top-down.Like Bain, which is the picture of Agile. And different kinds of Agility have strange, shallow definitions. "Operational agility," which is oddly missing its capital A, just means "making the existing business better." Also, apparently Agile has been around since the 60s because the authors couldn't be bothered to rewrite older history.

    The author's book, on Agile crap, was published a couple of years ago. I can't tell whether he's trying

  • Link to the book, and reviews (Score:3)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:35AM (#60019992) Homepage
    Link to the book: The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done [amazon.com].

    1-star review: Just plain wrong! [amazon.com]

    2-stars review: Wanders a long way off topic. [amazon.com]

    3 stars: Not too solid; vague arguments bad examples [amazon.com]

    5 stars: This Is A MUST Read Book For EVERYONE, Independent Of Industry Or Vocation!!! [amazon.com] Quote: "If someone does read this book and does not understand a concept being discussed consider asking for help from others..."

  • ... is a very good indicator that you are near or smack center in bullshit territory.

    Disclaimer: Scrum Master speaking here, so I know a thing or two about orgaising work in such a way as to optimise agility. Duh.

    To clarify: You can't embrace "Agile".
    You can "embrace agility", if you must say it so poetically.
    You can *be* agile. And being a CEO pretty much means being agile in many ways.
    That's why most CEOs have entire offices dedicated to organizing their work they need to do most effectively.
    This, of course, means that CEOs are basically agile by default.

    So I don't really get your question.

  • "firms that have been embracing Agile principles at the senior level for a number of years â" such as Microsoft and Amazon"

    Really? What about Jeff Bezos' autocratic memo of 2002 [dcc.ufmg.br], in which he states,

    All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces...Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

    The Agile Manifesto has great ideas in it. But the Agile community went nuts in the early 2000s, and advocates extreme practices that don't work at scale. What works is havin

    • I also think that perhaps there's just a false correlation here.

      The natural cycle of a company is to grow and shrink. IBM and GE are the Old Money, and MS/FANG are the New Money.

  • agile makes a lot of sense from a sw craftmanship perspective (*). in the sw business sense the whole agile fad is more like a sponge. executives should rather embrace a rock. a heavy one. in the open sea.

    (*) many of the original techniques in the agile umbrella (pair programming, test driven and incremental development, etc ...) are excellent principles to produce high quality, highly fitting and reliable software, particularly in projects with huge scope and/or uncertainty. this has nothing to do with the

  • "The answer to the paradox is simple. After a devastating collapse the previous month, investors poured into the "chosen few." Firms that have demonstrated business agility by taking advantage of technological possibility â" Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft"

    Wrong. People are mostly stuck inside and reliant on the products and services from these companies, as are many businesses with remote workers, in the case of O365.

  • At least the one with the "clueless" model of developer, where agile just means no rational strategy, getting bogged down in details, always reporting bullshit about the state of the project and not documenting anything as to why things were done. Also no after-the-fact analysis of failures.

  • Our local dog park has an agility training course.

    The ramps and the hanging tire to leap through.... etc.

    Chop chop, now, fad follower. Get agile!

  • They need to be chained together with a couple of 10 ton boulders and dropped onto the abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean.

    • And as usual with executives, an elaborate and needlessly costly plan when a cheap bullet could accomplish the same goal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Are you sure 10 tons is big enough? Don't forget they're mostly full of hot air.

  • Large corporations should not be agile. High agility means high uncertainty for shareholders. I want to invest in a solid factory, not some hipster concern that may tomorrow be serving cappuccino instead. It would not be compatible with worker rights if entire divisions can be changed overnight. People want stability and predictability. If you do agile in wall street, you end up with an economy like China.

  • What does this article even mean?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dfm3 ( 830843 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @08:02AM (#60020160) Journal
    I only got halfway through TFA, and filled in my buzzword Bingo card... and I still have no idea what "agile" means in this context.

  • Depends on what "Agile Principles" means... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by javabandit ( 464204 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @08:48AM (#60020278)

    If the article is asserting that C-suite execs should adopt the values from the original Agile Manifesto (https://www.agilemanifesto.org), then absolutely "YES".

    However, if the article is asserting that C-suite execs should employ the services of a bunch of blood-sucking, business process improvement consultants to learn a new process and charge tens of thousands of dollars in training services.... then "NO". Process improvement consultants single-handedly killed Agile culture adoption by bilking companies with tools, software, and books... which is completely antithetical to the Agile values themselves.

    C-suite execs shouldn't worry about a bunch of useless books, a bunch of useless processes, or a bunch of useless tools. Just read the values and adopt them. Practice them. The four values are simple. Do those things and you are Agile. That is all you need to do.

    • Sometimes Slashdot really needs a level 6 score for "the perfect answer".

    • But if they can't buy useless books and write useless processes, they'd have to change something! Or, worse, change their values and be subjected to those ridiculous things themselves.

      That's madness. Madness, I tells you!

    • The way I read the manifesto, there are 8 values. 4 of those are lifted above the 4 others.

      But then I don't do software, am an engineer by training and work in production... Far away from agile, and rightly so.

      • "The way I read the manifesto, there are 8 values. 4 of those are lifted above the 4 others. "

        The value is not "this" or that" (two) but "this over that" (one).

        Now, count again.

        • I read this line as not discarding the ones that others stage above: "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." If you don't value something, it can't be a value you hold. Conversely, and up to interpretation, you say you consider value in something (items on the right) implies you do value it, at least somewhat.

          Considering the items on the right, if you truly don't value any of those at all, I don't ever want to be near your code nor work with you. I a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      C-suite execs shouldn't worry about a bunch of useless books

      It's getting to the point where soon C-suite executives are going to have to start worrying about peasants with torches and pitchforks.

  • Yes (Score:2)

    by GlennC ( 96879 )

    Business Agility is essentially nothing more than open communication and effective feedback on a consistent basis.

    If that doesn't start at the highest levels of an organization, then the "Agile Transformation" is doomed.

  • If they're talking about "software Agile" then it will make short-sightedness even worse. Companies need a direction to steer in, even if it's kind of waffle-y...a 1 year plan, 2 year plan, maybe even a 5 year plan. Software Agile from my perspective can be translated to "we don't like planning, planning is for oldsters, if we're wrong we'll just fix it in the next sprint." IT and development don't do middle-ground solutions well...it's either no-plan Agile or this-is-the-only-plan Waterfall when realistica

  • People are forgetting good human work (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @09:13AM (#60020354)
    Agile is just a new word for 'excellent project management' because everyone forgot what it was. Likewise in management.

  • Of course they should (Score:3)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @09:35AM (#60020414)
    That's in essence what executives do: they embrace fads, and do nothing much else.

  • God no (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Monday May 04, 2020 @09:36AM (#60020418)

    I thought the Agile fad was over? I have never seen a process so in love with itself.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I love how, whenever an Agile project fails, they always say, "you just did Agile wrong." It's NEVER a problem with Agile.
  • Just make the correct incantations by moving this box from that column to that column and make that graph go down and all stand in a circle offering up your morning prayer to the project and suddenly you'll be more productive!

    And if you aren't more productive or if your points estimates go up and down like a yo-yo then it cannot possibly be because it's all a bunch of bullshit ceremony and mystical thinking. No, you're clearly doing the incantations wrong! So send your acolytes on expensive training cours

    • More like "No True Scotsman", or socialism/communism - if it didn't work out (which it never does), "you didn't do it right". No one ever questions the premise, just the execution.

  • Stupid buzzwords. Even the Department of Defense realizes that most people are either just faking it, or just plain stupid:

    https://media.defense.gov/2018... [defense.gov]

    Heaven forbid corporate executives ever let an engineer actually engineer, or a developer develop... that would incur too much risk.

  • The issue is with management.

    Management doesn't want to make any decisions that might bite them in the ass. And since *every* decision has the potential to bite them in the ass, they don't make any decisions. Instead, they simply say "That's not what I wanted". They will never tell you *what they want*, only that they don't want what you gave them.

    Put another way: Management only wants to take CREDIT. They never want to take BLAME.

    Bunch of cowards. Which would be fine, if they stayed out of the way of the p

  • can be as screwdup as the IT departments.

  • Why should only those who are working suffer?

  • Harvard Business Review publishes many articles about "agile business practices." You can read the articles, and see that they talk about "following agile principles" pretty often.

    No where do they ever talk about the Agile Principles and the more fundamental Agile values as laid out by the Agile Manifesto.

    The idea that there are written values and principles is part of "software Agile" but is not "business agile." That concept comes from "principle based business" which is its own way of organizing a comp

  • "Agile" is one of those buzzwords that 78.3% of the people who use it don't actually understand and/or have conflicting but never expressed definitions of in their heads.

    The Agile Manifesto is a nice aphorism devoid of practicle content. It's a mission statement, but not a mission. What it actually means and how to implement it, that's a different animal and that's also where things are suddenly not so simple anymore.

    On the management level, it's a buzzword. I've had so many managers use the word and so oft

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