Agile Drill Sergeant

Still waiting for a manager to realise that the coaching should start with them and not the team…

When you work for a consulting company, you don’t often get to choose your customers. Unfortunately. Too often, myself and my colleagues have been called in by management to “agilize” or “kanbanize” those development teams. It’s not the teams coming to us and saying “Hey, we’re having trouble getting Scrum/Kanban up and running. Could you help us?”. More often than not, it’s some manager who thinks that agile is a means of finally getting those unreliable developers to deliver on time. And sometimes you can really help a team out – if they want to be helped. But at some point the increasing agility of the team will run up against the rigidity of the organisation, which will realise that this agile team is a foreign body that needs to be expunged. End of the the agile experiment 🙁