Scrum Notes 2013-20

A strange tradition | credit: Alamy

Maybe I'm blind, or just some kind of reactionary fool unable to appreciate a success story when it leaps up to bite my face. I dunno. I feel bewildered though about what is beginning to count (or perhaps has always counted) as success in the Agile (sic) world.

I found this success story to be vacuous and devoid of meaning. And yet all the other commenters are overflowing with congratulations. To me, it just smacks of corporate appeasement, selling (for two years!) the Agile snake oil, this time in the form of big, fat, corporate, money-generating SAFe. And hooray, some people learned to collaborate (whatever that means).

Is this it? Is this success? Two years, with who knows how many consultants, to gain the insight, "If you are in deep ship it doesn't matter how deep it is. What counts is the will to get out of it" ...while still indulging corporate-speak of E2E and KPIs.

I'm losing my faith. I'm losing my sense of purpose.

To be fair to the writer of the report, he is not alone in this phoney fantasy of transformation. It is a cult growing by the day. We (sadly, I must include me) are slowly draining the individuality out of organizations with our Agile trickery, our smoke and mirrors, our certifications and promises. We are raking in the consulting fees and leaving behind, if we are lucky, a few people with a slightly greater hope of a fairer, more valuable world.

For the most part we just leave—with fatter wallets.

God help us!