Agile is Tulip!

[doodab]

I don't like prescriptive methodologies.

What's the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist?

A methodologist studies methods. A terrorist gets a prince 2 black belt scrum master badge and attacks UK infrastructure from the inside.

[vetran]

why didn't they get the team that did the VAT online to do it? They seem to know what they are doing.

[CoolCat]

Agile is crap. Many of its approaches, such as mixing the most junior techie staff up with the most senior users in workshops lead to obvious problems - easy example is junior techie under estimates and tells the senior user directly without any of the sanity checks of his more experienced workmates, senior user buys it and concensus breaks out for something that is by then hard to stop and apply common sense. Happens time and time again. Senior users think senior IT folk are "blockers", when often they are just saving the business from making massive mistakes. And no respect for past success only conformance with the bulltulip.

Universal Credit, and quite a few other big public sector IT programmes, fail because they put totally inappropriate folk in key positions. They endless reinvent reporting structures, job descriptions, and process and fail to actually put the right skills (if they even know what they are) in the right place.

There are a number of large public sector IT programmes currently staffed in all the senior leadership positions by military officers, or very recently ex military officers, who maybe good at commanding a regiment have no clue how to run a big IT/IS/business change programme. And other parts of the civil service are just as bad.

Together with the way the civil service head count reductions have been done, often the only people with substance have been kicked out to leave the internal politicians talking to real politicians.

And when they outsource it they tend to take far too much attention to the salemen from the consultancy vendors, instead of talking to the senior delivery folk.

[eek]

Agile is crap. Many of its approaches, such as mixing the most junior techie staff up with the most senior users in workshops lead to obvious problems - easy example is junior techie under estimates and tells the senior user directly without any of the sanity checks of his more experienced workmates, senior user buys it and concensus breaks out for something that is by then hard to stop and apply common sense. Happens time and time again. Senior users think senior IT folk are "blockers", when often they are just saving the business from making massive mistakes. And no respect for past success only conformance with the bulltulip.

That isn't a methodology issue, that is a management issue. You don't put users and junior techie staff together filters need to be applied.

[CoolCat]

That isn't a methodology issue, that is a management issue. You don't put users and junior techie staff together filters need to be applied.

its much more common on agile projects whether you want to point the finger at management or the methodology

[sasguru]

As an old-timer, all methodologies, if taken too seriously are crap. Part of the problem is that people get certificates in methodologies and think they actually know something. E.g. almost everyone I've met who's "done" Prince 2 is a numpty (for those cretins who are logically challenged this does not mean everyone with Prince 2 is a numpty, only that there are many numpties with Prince2).
There's no substitute for having as project manager someone seasoned who's been round the block in a variety of roles (especially development) and who also has comms skills. Problem is such people are rare as gold dust.

[BlasterBates]

Agile is just a description of how anyone over the last 40 years handles a project. I've just started my first project using "Agile". Well I'm sorry but apart from the rather silly names like "scrum" is no different to any other project I've worked on.

Agile means
1. You project meetings are called scrum meetings
2. Your project leader is called a "scrum master"
3. Releases are called "Sprints"
4. A requirement is called a "story"
5. You spent thousands getting somone to tell you this

[DimPrawn]

As an old-timer, all methodologies, if taken too seriously are crap. Part of the problem is that people get certificates in methodologies and think they actually know something. E.g. almost everyone I've met who's "done" Prince 2 is a numpty (for those cretins who are logically challenged this does not mean everyone with Prince 2 is a numpty, only that there are many numpties with Prince2).
There's no substitute for having as project manager someone seasoned who's been round the block in a variety of roles (especially development) and who also has comms skills. Problem is such people are rare as gold dust.

WSGS

[eek]

its much more common on agile projects whether you want to point the finger at management or the methodology

Management not following common sense when implementing a methodology badly. Who would expect that

Done properly Agile lets a client see what is going on early, ensuring that issues are caught early and hence fixed at a lower cost which is something Prince 2 will never do. Done badly though (like anything else) its a recipe for disaster...

[doodab]

agile methods were generally an improvement because they did away with a lot of dogma and allowed intelligent, experienced developers to interact with users, find out what they wanted and write a system to do it in a way that doesn't obstruct them.

Agile in the sense I've seen it applied generally doesn't do any of that. It primarily gives useless people some new ways to occupy their own and other peoples time.

Most methods work a lot better when you don't have useless people cluttering things up.