Agile Is for Losers

There are some principles of Agile that I think do make sense; one of them being "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.". Ironically, this is the first principle to get thrown out the window when an agency Agile project begins, when the project managers dictate exactly how things are going to go down, and do not trust anyone to do anything without them setting up how it's to be done.

360 degrees of our project room covered in a post-it note kanban matrix, which for some reason needed to physically mirror what we already had in 2 different web based project management tools (JIRA and Asana).

Like the quote from Tyler Durden in Fight Club, "Sticking feathers up your butt, does not make you a chicken." or, in other words, "Running waterfall projects with standups does not make you Agile".

In Scrum, no one can hear you scream…

He gave basic instructions to do something in an "agile fashion":

1. Find out where you are
2. Take a small step towards your goal
3. Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
4. Repeat

Also including a single line on "how to do it":

"When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier."

When it came time for the retrospective at the end of every fortnight, we brought up all the issues we faced. Ever time it was the same issues, with zero change observed or implemented by anyone leading the team. It got to the point when we started filling the "What worked?" column of the retro whiteboard with post-it notes simply saying: "Literally nothing." and under the "What didn't work?" column saying: "Literally everything." The entire thing really felt like a twisted inside joke, except for the fact that clearly nobody running the show was actually in on it.

not one of those "fake deadlines" - if we didn't launch this new site in 4 months, the current live site was going to be taken offline