Mega-Agile

A long time ago, way back in 2009, Bruce W worked for the Mega-Bureaucracy. It was a slog of endless forms, endless meetings, endless projects that just never hit a final ship date. The Mega-Bureaucracy felt that the organization which manages best manages the most, and ensured that there were six tons of management overhead attached to the smallest project.

After eight years in that position, Bruce finally left for another division in the same company.

But during those eight years, Bruce learned a few things about dealing with the Mega-Bureaucracy. His division was a small division, and while Bruce needed to interface with the Mega-Bureaucracy, he could shield the other developers on his team from it, as much as possible. This let them get embedded into the business unit, working closely with the end users, revising requirements on the fly based on rapid feedback and a quick release cycle. It was, in a word, "Agile", in the most realistic version of the term: focus on delivering value to your users, and build processes which support that. They were a small team, and there were many layers of management above them, which served to blunt and filter some of the mandates of the Mega-Bureaucracy, and that let them stay Agile.

Nothing, however, protects against management excess than a track record of success. While they had a reputation for being dangerous heretics: they released to test continuously and releasing to production once a month, they changed requirements as needs changed, meaning what they delivered was almost never what they specced, but it was what their users needed, and worst of all, their software defeated all the key Mega-Bureaucracy metrics. It performed better, it had fewer reported defects, it return-on-investment metrics their software saved the division millions of dollars in operating costs.

The Mega-Bureaucracy seethed at these heretics, but the C-level of the company just saw a high functioning team. There was nothing that the Bureaucracy could do to bring them in line-

-at least until someone opened up a trade magazine, skimmed the buzzwords, and said, "Maybe our processes are too cumbersome. We should do Agile. Company wide, let's lay out an Agile Process."

There's a huge difference between the "agile" created by a self-organizing team, that grows based on learning what works best for the team and their users, and the kind of "agile" that's imposed from the corporate overlords.

First, you couldn't do Agile without adopting the Agile Process, which in Mega-Bureaucracy-speak meant "we're doing a very specific flavor of scrum". This meant morning standups were mandated. You needed a scrum-master on the team, which would be a resource drawn from the project management office, and well, they'd also pull double duty as the project manager. The word "requirements" was forbidden, you had to write User Stories, and then estimate those User Stories as taking a certain number of hours. Then you could hold your Sprint Planning meeting, where you gathered a bucket of stories that would fit within your next sprint, which would be a 4-week cadence, but that was just the sprint planning cadence. Releases to production would happen only quarterly. Once user stories were written, they were never to be changed, just potentially replaced with a new story, but once a story was added to a sprint, you were expected to implement it, as written. No changes based on user feedback. At the end of the sprint, you'd have a whopping big sprint retrospective, and since this was a new process, instead of letting the team self-evaluate in private and make adjustments, management from all levels of the company would sit in on the retrospectives to be "informed" about the "challenges" in adopting the new process.

The resulting changes pleased nearly no one. The developers hated it, the users, especially in Bruce's division, hated it, management hated it. But the Mega-Bureaucracy had won; the dangerous heretics who didn't follow the process now were following the process. They were Agile.

That is what motivated Bruce to transfer to a new position.

Two years later, he attended an all-IT webcast. The CIO announced that they'd spun up a new pilot development team. This new team would get embedded into the business unit, work closely with the end user, revise requirements on the fly based on rapid feedback and a continuous release cycle. "This is something brand new for our company, and we're excited to see where it goes!"

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