[Technology] **** OFFICIAL Agile Project Management Thread ****

[Sirnormangall]

Well I've just completed and passed my Agile Project management "exams" (well hardly) and afterwards the penny dropped. I learnt this at University but they didn't call it "Agile" - that's just been tagged on recently.

As above it's just a re-hash of the reaction to RAD development with a very dubious definition of "quality".

I came away thinking (used the wrong way) simply offers excuses.

It took 10 years (on time)
It cost 5 million (on budget)

.. and the project delivered a "turd". That's right and a "quality" turd no less.

"A Turd" was a "must have" but we managed to persuade the users that all the other features were "could have" and we were "empowered" to drop them.

I currently realised why so far projects I've experienced have gone wrong.

Well done on your new qualification. It’s great to see, from your last sentence, that Agile has a benefit.

 

[clapham_gull]

I simply ticked a box and went on it. Mainly to support a few non "technical others", cos I'm a bit technical and all that.

I HAVE NO INTENTION OF EVER BEING A PROJECT MANAGER

It's ain't that different from Prince II and mainly common sense. But "Agile" in the development sense ?

A few poor others were a bit confused. I thought "agile" was about less documentation, but we've spent a whole day learning about documentation

 

[Gwylan]

Have just come across a phrase I'd not heard of before: Lean Agile, combining the best of Lean and Agile methodologies (of course). What the hell is that?

 

[clapham_gull]

Have just come across a phrase I'd not heard of before: Lean Agile, combining the best of Lean and Agile methodologies (of course). What the hell is that?

I think it's a combination of the two methodologies "snake" and "oil", fusing the two into an easy to learn 4 day course where 50% is the pass mark and nobody fails.

 

[Gwylan]

I think it's a combination of the two methodologies "snake" and "oil", fusing the two into an easy to learn 4 day course where 50% is the pass mark and nobody fails.

 

[Garry Nelson's teacher]

I once told my manager to go f*** himself. Would this count as agile management?

 

[Iggle Piggle]

Have just come across a phrase I'd not heard of before: Lean Agile, combining the best of Lean and Agile methodologies (of course). What the hell is that?

Isn't that Anorexic?

 

[Shropshire Seagull]

Have just come across a phrase I'd not heard of before: Lean Agile, combining the best of Lean and Agile methodologies (of course). What the hell is that?

We are about to experiment with ScrumBan
My team doesn't deliver software and has no concept of delivery releases - I was bought in to "fix" their Scrum process that was perceived as failing - ScrumBan may be the answer, we'll see ...

 

[FatSuperman]

We are about to experiment with ScrumBan
My team doesn't deliver software and has no concept of delivery releases - I was bought in to "fix" their Scrum process that was perceived as failing - ScrumBan may be the answer, we'll see ...

If a team is struggling with scrum, moving to scrumban might work. Basically, just have a board of stuff to do and whatever statuses you want (new, analysis, development, test, deployment, done). Only put stuff on the board when it needs to come into the team.

The vast majority of companies that are moving to agile are just applying a new language and changing nothing. 'Agile' is a mindset change, the process part of it is less important. If you are looking at problems/opportunities differently, then you'll naturally approach them diferently. Most companies try to go through some sort of 'transformation' process, usually delivering this as a transaction to the various affected teams. And the rest of the business still thinks and works in a very sequential 'waterfall' manner.

 

[dazzer6666]

If a team is struggling with scrum, moving to scrumban might work. Basically, just have a board of stuff to do and whatever statuses you want (new, analysis, development, test, deployment, done). Only put stuff on the board when it needs to come into the team.

The vast majority of companies that are moving to agile are just applying a new language and changing nothing. 'Agile' is a mindset change, the process part of it is less important. If you are looking at problems/opportunities differently, then you'll naturally approach them diferently. Most companies try to go through some sort of 'transformation' process, usually delivering this as a transaction to the various affected teams. And the rest of the business still thinks and works in a very sequential 'waterfall' manner.

...but....but.....we must somehow capture the sprints to quick wins.......[emoji23][emoji23][emoji23] [emoji90] [emoji90] [emoji90]

 

[thedonkeycentrehalf]

My workplace got very over excited about Agile and now you can't just have a meeting - everything is a scrum

 

[beorhthelm]

I once told my manager to go f*** himself. Would this count as agile management?

if you put the user story in the backlog, with definition of done, i think it would be acceptable.

 

[clapham_gull]

I once told my manager to go f*** himself. Would this count as agile management?

Yes, if your peers had:

1) Clearly requested the requirement "As a user, I would like you to tell our manager to go **** youself, because we don't like them" as a MUST TO HAVE.

Don't be distracted by a requirement to tell your manager to simply "**** off", because that is clearly a COULD HAVE in view of the first.

2) You told your manager to go **** yourself by the DEADLINE dictated by the business.

3) You told your manager to go **** yourself within BUDGET.

Ideally, you would tell your manager to go **** yourself in an ITERATIVE way, TEST the go **** youself independently and get the go **** yourself SIGNED OFF by a senior VISIONARY.

In practice that would mean telling your manager to go **** yourself and getting something else to ask your manager whether you told them to go **** yourself. Repeat the process a number of times until you are confident they have been told to go **** yourself. During this process don't be afraid to tell your manager to go **** yourself a number of times

Finally find the senior person who always wanted to tell them to go **** yourself to sign off whether your manager was successfully told to go **** yourself. That could be as simple as the senior person asking your manager "Did Garry Nelson's teacher tell you to **** yourself ?" and recording the result in a spreadsheet. Don't get fixated by process.

If HR want to place the incident on your personal record, remind them this was an agile to go **** yourself and you favour a working go **** yourself over all documentation. You also favour telling someone to go **** yourself to their face rather than over email.

If you followed the process above then yes, it was an example of Agile Project Management.

 

[Audax]

Worth noting (since I haven't seen anyone else call it out explicitly) that "Agile" project management is an umbrella term that covers multiple methodologies and techniques. Scrum is just one, Kanban is another (along with the ******* child of both: Scrumban), Lean, etc.

The first, and probably biggest, mistake that any company trying Agile approaches could make is to attempt to rigidly stick to any specific "text book" approach. The text book is a great place to start (as long as you've got someone in the business who understands it), but it's just that: a starting point. It should subsequently be allowed to evolve (under supervision) to ensure it best matches the requirements of the business and the individual teams within the business.

Where I work, we have multiple teams. All the teams have been trained the same way, but no two teams operate the same way. We're all Agile, however. We use Kanban a lot, We make heavy use of Lean UX techniques, and we borrow a lot from some other Agile approaches as well. The results have been amazing, and there's no way we'll go back. We'll continue to evolve our techniques to suit the business and teams as necessary, but the successes we've had have fundamentally proven that Agile approaches do work when done right. You do, however, need the buy in from the entire business (which is why when the dev teams go through training, the *entire business* does the training; including the CEO).

I don't think you could build a shopping mall for example using Agile methodology.

Heathrow Terminal 5 was built using Agile project management techniques. Quite successfully so, in the main.

Yes, if your peers had:

1) Clearly requested the requirement "As a user, I would like you to tell our manager to go **** youself, because we don't like them" as a MUST TO HAVE.

Don't be distracted by a requirement to tell your manager to simply "**** off", because that is clearly a COULD HAVE in view of the first.

2) You told your manager to go **** yourself by the DEADLINE dictated by the business.

3) You told your manager to go **** yourself within BUDGET.

Ideally, you would tell your manager to go **** yourself in an ITERATIVE way, TEST the go **** youself independently and get the go **** yourself SIGNED OFF by a senior VISIONARY.

In practice that would mean telling your manager to go **** yourself and getting something else to ask your manager whether you told them to go **** yourself. Repeat the process a number of times until you are confident they have been told to go **** yourself. During this process don't be afraid to tell your manager to go **** yourself a number of times

Finally find the senior person who always wanted to tell them to go **** yourself to sign off whether your manager was successfully told to go **** yourself. That could be as simple as the senior person asking your manager "Did Garry Nelson's teacher tell you to **** yourself ?" and recording the result in a spreadsheet. Don't get fixated by process.

If HR want to place the incident on your personal record, remind them this was an agile to go **** yourself and you favour a working go **** yourself over all documentation. You also favour telling someone to go **** yourself to their face rather than over email.

If you followed the process above then yes, it was an example of Agile Project Management.

And here we have an example of someone who a) has clearly been exposed to badly applied Agile methodology and assumed it's always bad, and b) clearly had no intention of actually paying any more attention than required to pass the course they apparently did (and/or the course was a bad one).

Now excuse me ... I have a Lean Coffee in 10 minutes .

 

[clapham_gull]

And here we have an example of someone who a) has clearly been exposed to badly applied Agile methodology and assumed it's always bad, and b) clearly had no intention of actually paying any more attention than required to pass the course they apparently did (and/or the course was a bad one).

Now excuse me ... I have a Lean Coffee in 10 minutes .

Ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh get you.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Newspeak for Cowboy Coding. That's why your banking system now goes AWOL for hours or days. It's all about management doing it on the cheap and chucking it live without exhaustive testing

 

[Audax]

Newspeak for Cowboy Coding. That's why your banking system now goes AWOL for hours or days. It's all about management doing it on the cheap and chucking it live without exhaustive testing

No one should ever have known that TSB was doing that migration that they cocked up. Whether or not they managed that with Agile methodology (I suspect they didn't) is irrelevant - whoever it was made the decision to do a "big bang" cut over made a massive mistake. They should have migrated to a test environment in advance, then had the migrated data running and being updated in parallel with the original data for a few weeks, used that time to verify everything was working as expected, and then done a seamless cut over from old to new once their confidence levels were 100%.

Most banks are a long, long way away from being Agile. Monzo is the closest to being any good at it, but they have the advantage of being a new player deliberately trying to disrupt that sector: for them, agile is a requirement.

 

[timbha]

anyone else heard it referred to as "FRAGILE" with the R referring to Rubbish? Can't think what the F refers to

 

[WATFORD zero]

It is interesting the amount of excitement that development methodologies can generate.

Particularly when, for every successful software product I was ever responsible for, at least 1000 times the development investment (and often far greater) was spent in maintenance and enhancements after reaching the market.

Making new stuff is easy. Maintenance is nowhere near as much fun, although in my experience, that's where the serious profit and work is done

 

[HalfaSeatOn]

This is what we'll do in the next two weeks and we'll touch base daily on progress (agile) compared to these are the tasks to complete the project and we'll meet fortnightly on progress (traditional). Agile works but feels like micromanagement at times and looks a good social for the millennials.