Why is agile not working for you?

Is agile not working for you? Well you might be doing one of several things listed below. If you are not someone habituated to reading a long numbered list , just skip to the last couple of points

1. You think it is a process
2. You have a checklist that tells you what you should be doing to be agile compliant
3. You are doing agile because your boss told you so
4. Every time when your team wants to do something different, you don’t allow them to do that because Version 3.1.1 of XAgileFramework specification says that that’s not the right way of doing it
5. Your agile “process” starts once your requirements are frozen & design phase is 68.328% complete
6. You hire any random guy who can put a semicolon at end of every line & calls the resultant file a java class
7. Everytime your team has to procure a whiteboard they need to get your “approval” which you need to take to “procurement” so that they can get “best deal”
8. At every step when something needs to be done your team member asks “is this my responsibility”?
9. When you are focused on whether “sprint fails” or “sprint is successful” and not whether you are developing what your customers want
10. Your estimates need to be approved by “Product” aka “Product Management”
11. Neither you, nor your team , nor anyone up to nth level in hierarchy has any clue what Relative Estimates are.
12. You have “stabilization sprint”, “setup sprint”, “velocity boost sprint”, “integration sprint”, “planning sprint” <– For crying out loud
13. You know all BOKs by heart but have never read or understood agile manifesto
14. You consider rework as a disease worse than plague
15. Nobody told you that “Find/Replace” & “Refactoring” are two very different animals
16. Your team needs “Training” to move from version 3.4.6 of a framework to version 3.6.0 of same framework.
17. You think half a dozen people joining a video conference is zenith of collaboration
18. No one told you that agile might be a lot of things but its about “doing the right thing” first.
19. No one told you that it is about people & culture first. Rest all i.e. framework, process, certification range between nice to have to should not have

Since 19 is an odd number if I stop here it will mean I have thought through this ,whereas if I end at a round figure one might think I was just making up stuff. So stopping at 19

Originally published at meworkntech.wordpress.com on November 28, 2016.