Agile sucks balls, Hybrid ain’t working & you’ve way too many people on your project.

Agilists – unless you have practical experience deploying Agile in a contextual way sympathetic to the constraints of the business you’re applying it to, Agile means sh*t. It’s 2022 & I’m officially tired of talking about Scrum, Nexus, SAFe, putting fckn Post It notes on my whiteboard & all the BS which comes with it. No amount of frameworks or process will ever beat common sense. Agile is simple, it really is. Sorry, there I said it.

Clients – FFS, stop hiring management consultants. Yes, you know who you are. Get some C-level backbone & make some decisions, set a direction & roadmap, and have the minimal amount of people to do any one thing. When you’re groaning at the seam, add one person, then go again for a bit. Only add more people when there’s a genuine need. The amount of people & the complexity of human behaviour will push any process to its limit. Reduce the people doing the thing & hold those fewer people more accountable & more responsible. Sure use management consultants, but NOT ALL OF THEM. ON ONE PROJECT. F*ck.

If you asked me as a client what is the number one thing you can do to make your project a success, I wouldn’t say Nexus, or Agile or Watergate Scrumball fckn something or other, I’d say, REDUCE THE PEOPLE INVOLVED.

I’m a bit tired.

You can probably tell but I am sick & tired of watching people fck up projects because there’s just so many of em’ , people I mean.  We’ve mapped the human genome over twenty years ago, we’ve synthesised an effective vaccine for a global pandemic in months, we can land fckn rockets at the same time. On a barge. In the fckn pacific! But we still struggle to deploy an AWS landing zone and migrate some data in a safe & secure way. C’mon.

And management consultants, for fc*ks sake, forget your commercial KPI’s, forget your bonus, forget the BS, be a fckn decent human being. Think of the client, think of doing the right thing, think of not acting like a frustrated five year old fckn toddler because you have to work with another management consultancy firm, just do the right thing…fuuuuccccckkkk!

Oh and that brings me neatly onto hybrid working. Just so there’s no confusion on where my personal heads at with this; unless there’s a genuine reason, and I mean really fckn genuine, every decision you make on whether to, or to not work in the office or your company premises on any given day, you should lean to the bias of going into the office. We’re predicated as a species to do better things when we’re together. I don’t care if you don’t agree – you’re wrong.  The other shortfall on tech projects is the fact half the many many people involved are working from home – the dynamic doesn’t work. For it to work, people have to be performing at their optimum, & more often than not, teams can’t spell optimum never mind work optimally.

• Micro manager sending hundreds of messaging per week because they have FOMO?
• Client complaining they don’t know what’s going on?
• Scrum team having a moan because objectives aren’t clear
• Management Consultancy firms not playing nicely together because it’s easier to be a dick over email?

Yeah, all because of hybrid working, that sucks too.

Have a great day – dont’ forget to listen to the podcast version of this post which is even more ranty over on Spotify, search ‘Delivery Manager Daily’