Have you been fooled that corporate work delivery methodologies are important?
We’ve noticed there’s been an unnanounced disturbing mind-virus affecting office workers in many countries in multiple business sectors including civil service, government, local government, commercial media, non commercial, design, banking. The ‘agile work methodology’ apparently started out as a joke, non serious way of being anti-corporate and a backlash against micro-management and snooping techniques by corporate ‘organisations’.
The origins of anti-corporate sentiments have been chewed up, repackaged and regurgitated into a bolus of dysfunctional ineffective ceremonies. This is the direct opposite what agile set out to change. Control by the organisations and snoooping on staff.
The daily standup (appelplatz)
Agile was never meant to be like this. A mind-virus was released and offices became the host. The working day for millions of people start with what is known as a ‘daily stand up’. This key component ceremony requires personnel from multiple teams to state what they did yesterday and what they’re doing today. Sounds harmless. The reality is different. Regardless if team members are working on related projects or not the daily standup whip is cracked, it, [the stand up]begins.
Workers from all departments are alerted by a ‘ping’ from their computer calendar and all gather in formation. An hour of standing to attention begins 1 by 1.
Workers state what they did yesterday and what they’re doing today.
Much similar to the roll calls (appelplatz) that were a key component of the daily regimen in prison, carried out to count the prisoners but and to inspect what they did yesterday, humiliate, weaken and intimidate them.
Often there is more than1 daily standup that repeats itself for an entire half-a-day every day. This equates to 2 days out of 5 purely used for listening and telling the office what you’ve worked on and what you’re about to do. Evidence suggests adopting agile is innefective and has turned into an unproductive cycle of ceremony followed by another ceremony (referred to as back-to-back meetings). Now thats for another time.
Here’s a training video found on youtube claiming how and why the US government use standups
Agile ceremonies and their dysfunctional systems
A big sigh, but agile is now a toxic hissing cocktail of defunkt business methodologies from the 1990’s. RAD, Unified Process, SCRUM, Extreme Programming, Feature driven and all commonly known as ‘Waterfall’. All overplanned and micromanaged. Inflexible and inhuman to work under such conditions. Agile was developed with all the best intentions but unfortunately the corporates didn’t like it, got hold of it and management wrung its neck, turned it inside out moulded it into something else but still call it agile.
The agile ceremonies required to produce a button on a website
Sprint planning ceremony
Daily standup pre standup
Daily standup ceremony
Sprint review ceremony
Sprint pre planning
Sprint retrospective ceremony
Sprint retrospective, retrospective ceremony
Product backlog refinement
Scrum-of-Scrums
Show and tell (yes its really called this)
Three Amigos ceremony
