Fake Agile Vs. Fake Processes

Shocking , right!

I can't even think about the possibility of you stumbling over a company claiming that "We are Agile or Lean company", maybe once a day or more than 5 times a day if you work in direct contact with C-Level like I do.

The thing is, saying you are an agile company is a big seller in the market weather the buyer or the client from the IT industry or an outsider business owner who wants to make his/her life easier and more profitable. of course the chances of selling the agile idea are higher if the client is outsider, and knows nothing about the SDLCs or how it's done.

The definition recognizes that some of the most successful Agile implementations use home-grown terminology. In other words, these firms don’t even call themselves Agile and shy away from standard Agile vocabulary, some of which (like Scrum) was deliberately devised to be unattractive to management. Thus, most of the largest and fastest-growing firms on the planet—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Microsoft—are recognizably Agile in much of what they do, even though they generally don’t use standard Agile vocabulary. Their business agility is an important reason why they have become the most valuable firms in the world.

Surveys by Deloitte and McKinsey show that more than 90% of senior executives give high priority to becoming agile, while less than 10% see their firm as currently highly agile.

Talking about the beauty of agile development methodologies and frequent releases gives the provider - who I will call "seller" - a higher chance of closing the deal and gaining the client's trust while stating the process - Scrum is a good story - and how amazing the speed and quality are. You may consider it as good point for the company that it sells - deceives - to a lot of clients and opens multiple accounts, but I won't agree with you as this is a short term revenue and no client will stay - no loyalty or whatever -.

What I want to talk about is a little deeper, I want to talk about what happens behind closed doors in fake agile companies, and how agile is being used as a torture and harassments tool. At first the whole agile idea was built to increase the productivity of teams thus the whole organization. That is for the inside, and for the business part it helps increasing the interactions and involvement of the client which is preferred to be called - according to Agile - as the stakeholders and that of course increases the enhances the coverage of data and feedback during and after the development. Good selling point, right!.

“You can’t scale mindsets. You either have them or you don’t, but obviously everyone in the organization has to have the same mindset. If you don’t have people in the organization with that mindset you are going to run into massive conflicts,” Steve Denning. 

Fake Agilest are easy to spot really just trace and check the following points - According to the DoD - a fake Agile project is one where:

• No one is talking with or observing the software users - The whole idea is to deliver anything to the client to add another project to the stream.
• There is no continuous feedback loop between the users and the teams - Get the feedback when you stuck, Give the feedback when they insist. Agile depends on feedback from the customer to work properly. Less experienced dev teams may be satisfied with one or two feedback forms (that take about a month to get back) but in reality this isn’t good enough.
• There is a strong emphasis on requirements - you will be lucky if any requirement exists, and if any, it will be very basic info.
• Stakeholders are autonomous - to be fair, they don't identify the stakeholders from the beginning as it considered a waste of time for a group with no input.
• End users are not present in any of the development - literally END user. Developers are not interested in communicating with real users of the application (program testing and evaluation don’t count); if there is feedback, it is not continuous (only happens at the start of the project).
• Manual processes are tolerated - lots of scope for automation.

So how it's done - especially within SMEs -?

First of all a lot of the SMEs have a little knowledge about what happens within an agile team in real life, but they knows the practices very well, so they practice without actual knowledge of how it is done.

Some people use “agile” to refer to any firm calling itself, or claiming to be, agile. This usage leads to many firms being called agile even though they are not being managed any differently from traditional bureaucracy. It also excludes some of the firms that have been most successful in implementing Agile, because they don’t use the standard terminology of Agile. Hence this usage leads to many firms which might be called “Agile in name only” or what I have sometimes called “fake Agile.” In other words, to understand whether a firm is Agile, we have to look beyond what firms are saying and look at how they are operating.

Let's take the SCRUM for a begging. All the scrum teams will absolutely agree on one thing for sure, and that will be the standup meeting every day. That beautiful 10 minutes meeting is being held as check list for tasks of yesterday and tasks of the day - that is not it's purpose -, and that put a pressure on the shoulders of each team member participating as if its a congressional hearing. I myself participated in some of this nonsense meetings being held as a questioner as if no one can make a to do list or follow the plan without the guidance of the scrum master - in some cases - or by one of the senior development team members. And that got me thinking about the purpose of this FAKE processes if we are going to do the meetings and follow the processes just for the sack of doing so. It is just fake.

If your Scrum Master is acting like a team leader it is FAKE agile

The role of agile leadership is often misunderstood. Too often teams will have positions like scrum master and product owner assigned, only to find that in practice those individuals are performing the exact same functions as a project manager in any typical development framework.

“They are sort of like flamenco dancers who wear flamenco costumes and talk about flamenco but don’t know how to actually dance flamenco dancing. They don’t have the spirit or sense of what it is to be a flamenco dancer,” said Steve Denning, an Agile thought leader and author of the book The Age of Agile.

One thing that separates Agile from other approaches to software development is the focus on the people doing the work and how they work together. Solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams utilizing the appropriate practices for their context.

That’s not to say that agile is “better” than whatever was happening before at your company, but old habits can certainly interfere with the way agile functions, and it’s important to transition certain behaviors with proper training. When teams aren’t properly educated about their roles and responsibilities in an agile framework, they will default to what they know, and old habits die hard.

The core principles of Agile are still important for helping organizations deliver value more efficiently and effectively, but somewhere along the way the word Agile has become corrupt and depreciated that it causing confusion amongst the industry. For instance, there are no Agile programmers or Agile teams, there are programmers and development teams who practice agility, and tools that help them increase that agility. -SD Times

“Agile is a buzzword of software development, and so all DoD software development projects are, almost by default, now declared to be ‘agile.’ The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to DoD program executives and acquisition professionals on how to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (‘agile-scrum-fall’),” The Department of Defense (DoD) is uncovering the fakes with the release of its “Detecting Agile BS” guide. 

It is not that dark all the time and I like to quote Steve Denning as he was asked about If you are in fact practicing fake Agile, Denning said the first step is to take a deep breath and start to look for some genuine Agile within the organization. “You will find people who really understand what is going on and actually operating in this fashion, so find those teams that are genuinely on the right track. Find out what is getting in their way, what impediments they have, start removing those impediments, give encouragement to those teams, celebrate their successes, and encourage other parts of the organization to start embracing it,”

If you are lower down in the company and at the team level, and don’t really have the power to do any of that, Denning also suggested persuading management of the benefits by getting a small team or group of teams that are doing it right to achieve some success. 

I think the beauty of adapting any agile technique relays heavily on your and your teams ability to create your own agile environment, processes and practices keeping the main agile guidelines as your reference.