Thread by @RonJeffries

So I've been thinking about the #Agile Indu$trial Complex 😀 as um discussed at length by @DanielMezick and others, and chatting with @chethendrickson, and I have a few thoughts and questions to share.
/1

Imagine, if you will, that you're a somewhat ranking manager in a rather large company. You become aware of #Agile, through reading in Forbes or drinking with your fellow mucky-mucks, and you come to see that amid the hype, there seems to be some good happening.
/2

You learn that the methods, and there are a lot of them, are all rather similar, and that they all offer greater visibility into the work, faster turnaround in response to your needs, and a focus, by the teams, on improving.
/3

Obviously, you need some of this. Looking around the organization, you see that most everywhere there's product-ish development going on, you need this.

What are you to do?
/4

Well, you /could/ hold a plebiscite and ask all the workers what to do. You can't really do this, because if you did, they'd mostly die of shock, and the ones that lived would know for certain that you were just fucking with them.
/5

You could try an experiment or two, maybe finding teams that wanted to do something, and have them experiment for a year or two, then assess the results, and after some period of time ... do what?
/6

You could a) then pick a method or b) keep letting teams do whatever they wanted. The latter, much as I think it would be a good idea, runs deeply counter to What We Do Here at XYZ Corp.

Our job here at XYZ is to manage.
/7

Or you could, with some amount of due diligence, decide what framework to use: Scrum looks good but small. SAFe looks like a big company thing. LeSS looks small but good, but you've never heard of it.
/8

If you're big enough, your due diligence might involve a Large Consulting Company, a McKinsey or Deloitte or some such. If you're smaller, maybe you pick it up on the street.

No matter how you base the decision, you're going to make it. That's how things work at XYZ.
/9

(Side topic to revisit: unless you pick Kanban (which you likely won't), you probably have to make organizational changes to put your method in place. This requires management decisions.)
/10

You can even make a decent case that the organization should use the same approach all over. This would make training easier, provide common terminology, and such.

However it goes, you decide, because that's your job.
/11

So, imagine that you say, "OK, all the teams are gonna do Method B". Is this harmful? Frankly, I don't think so. Management's job is to set the direction. The question is what happens next.
/12

Suppose what happens next is Certified B-Master training for everyone. Is that bad? I don't see how.

Is it bad to bring in coaches? I'd say not inherently bad, but that it might depend on what the coaches say and do.
/13

So where's the evil #Agile Indu$trial Complex in all this? Serious question. What's missing from this story that looks like the evil AIC?

Show me. Lead me.
/14

Now my schtick, of course is Dark Agile. Where is that?
Dark Agile is in what happens next. We can and should talk about that.

But right now, the question is, what have I missed in my story that missed out the heavy imposition by the #Agile Indu$trial Complex?
/15 end

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