How to Sabotage Agile, Part I

Posted by Robert Merrill on November 9, 2009 under Agile BA, Agile Methods | Read the First Comment

(This is from The BA Role in an Agile Environment, presented on 9/15/2009 at the Madison chapter of the IIBA).

The most effective weather safety talk I ever heard was called “How To Get Hit by Lightning.” By telling us what to do if we wanted to get killed, it communicated what to do if we wanted to stay safe, only in a far more engaging way.

So, in that spirit, How to Sabotage Agile.

• Encourage compromise of one or more of the load-bearing walls of Agile. When someone warns against this, say, “I’m just being pragmatic here. I want us to go Agile more than anybody, but we’ll never get it in the door if we’re zealots—don’t worry, we’ll tighten this up later.”
• Tell business people—the higher-ranking, the better, that Agile promises to make developers more productive and therefore finally able to hit arbitrary scopes, schedules, and budgets. Better still, it will require no changes in executives’ involvement or behavior, or that of their reports, in connection with software projects.
• When putting together project teams, encourage as much specialization and as many job titles if you can. Minimize common chains of authority. If the lowest common supervisor of all team members is the CEO, perfect!
• One day, tell someone in the architecture group, the PMO, the DBA group, or the QA group that you heard that the people in the puffy chairs are really happy we’re “going Agile,” because it means they can finally get rid of all of the overpaid non-programmer dead wood. You’re only telling her, “So you can get a jump-start on your job search,” of course.
• The next day, tell someone else in the architecture group, the PMO, the DBA group, or the QA group that you heard that “going Agile” is just for programmers and BAs and won’t affect him at all, “Because I don’t want you to worry,” of course.

But wait, there’s more! Check out How to Sabotage Agile, Part II and How to Sabotage Agile, Part III!