Unintended Victims of The Agile Process: What You Can Do

Gil Broza specializes in increasing organizational agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Dozens of companies seeking transformations, makeovers or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern and respectful support for customizing agile in their contexts. His book "The Agile Mind-Set" helps practitioners go beyond process and adopt a true agile approach to work. His book "The Human Side of Agile" is a practical book on leading agile teams to greatness. These days, several of the world's largest organizations are having him train hundreds of their managers in technology and business (up to VP level) on practical agile leadership. Get Gil's popular 20-session mini-program "Something Happened on the Way to Agile" free at OnTheWayToAgile.com.

  Agile   Scrum  

I regularly train and coach hundreds of software professionals whose teams recently switched to Agile. Everywhere I go, I encounter people who consider themselves “victims” of the agile process. These are competent contributors, managers and project managers who never asked for agile, have had no say in its implementation and hate going through its motions.

Resistance to Agile
According to the ScrumMaster of a team I was assessing, “Of course our iterations are overhead. Our retrospectives and demos just can’t result in any meaningful change. Our product managers have chopped their requirements documents into stories, the PMO has determined our process and that’s what we use to just implement one story after another.”

Interviewing team members at another IT group that had adopted Scrum a year before, the anger was palpable. The latest object of their disaffection was the new planning board, installed after the business analysts came back from a course. The overwhelming sentiment was, “We’d love to just hurl the board out the window.”

Do you work with people like that? They are easy to spot. They stroll dejectedly to the Daily Scrum, where they give short, perfunctory answers to questions. At sprint planning, they dutifully raise their Planning Poker cards on cue, and rarely challenge the item they are …

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