The new new world of work

I enjoyed your post but I have to agree that SCRUM is doesn't create results that SCRUM claims to produce. Not to say it is all bad but to say that Sprint cycles are empirical is nonsense. During the planning meeting X features are planned and the amount of work and it's real world relevancy is at the mercy of BU, the client, QA and management. It is not unusual to see 30 features that equate to probably double tasks and sub-tasks, that cannot be properly estimated in a planning meeting thus development and testing that sounds easy is almost always anything but, for at least a couple features per cycle. There is no real collaboration or respect for the experience of individuals in all business units, and multitasking to try and get through the planned work results often in a "ship than fix" release. SCRUM is stressful and stifling; creatively, collaboratively, ignores a very large knowledge pool by requirements analysts just doing requirements, developers just development, and QA just testing creating an environment that wastes time and leads to micromanagement. Pure SCRUM doesn't make employees feel trusted, and frequently includes work that the collective experience in the room would would put in a permanent backlog, as features left out of the current sprint should have taken priority over features no one uses or will ever care about. Not to mention that Continuous Integration, IaaS, Paas, SaaS and cloud containers have turned the development paradigm upside down. Frankly I think it is time to adopt a more efficient, predictive, collaborative, truly empirical project management paradigm. I speak specifically of Kanban which does utilize some SCRUM elements but does away with defects, allows for high quality, near bug free product to be delivered to the client incrementally, which allows for better estimates and reporting. The entire group decides what the 10 most pressing features or tasks are and are put in swim lanes, and once a feature gets to testing, the developer then chooses the next feature based on a very open and collaborative environment. In the event any of the teams hits a bottleneck, even though members of the groups may not be as proficient in the specific task, Kanban encourages colleagues to help if they have time. This leads to better moral, and as the delivery of 10 features averages pretty quickly to a predictable amount of time, management is less likely to micromanage and to trust the people who are indeed the experts. The end result is very few defects, a creative and motivated team that is encouraged to innovate, establishes stronger interpersonal relationships, and is truly a democratic and collaborative paradigm that eliminates knowledge silos, and allows for extremely high quality releases that the end user enjoys using as everyone involved was allowed to do their job without interference. Not to mention, releasing after x features cycles have been implemented, allows the users to learn the system incrementally and is proven to nearly guarantee immediate user acceptance. I just don't think in this current IT development environment that any knowledge should go wasted as you never know who may have a wealth of knowledge that in SCRUM nobody would ever consider. Finally the teamwork and planned celebrations upon each cycle is a small reward and gesture of appreciation while creating relationships that you typically don't find in any IT shop, preventing turnover and fostering respect and growth. That's just my opinion.

James Kies I always enjoy seeing new grids and models like this. My first Instructional Design job was for a very "Reality" oriented company... and perhaps that is why the models I've developed strive for Collaboration... the direct opposite! ALSO - Thanks for sharing the 2nd screenshot because it shows what was cropped off at the top of the first one :)