Agile is great, for many reasons. Not least but including:
Having loads and loads of meetings. Like teaching people to build a car or town with Lego using an Agile methodology. Instead of letting them do it themselves, it was a game-changer on memories of Lego as a kid, the impact was like coming off a waterfall, no, even being in a waterfall.
Improving meetings by doing them standing up with a whiteboards instead of a meeting room glassboard. Not only freeing up precious meeting room space for those teams doing scrums with remote teams that also do stand-up whiteboard scrums on their own, our white boards cost leading to less wear-and-tear, scrums tend to last for 30-60 minutes, improving everyone's cardiovascular system, and we can do them at any time of the day whenever the team lead decides a scrum should be done, damn everyone's productivity, it is all about the scrum and helping everyone get things done. My team lead says Agile is a better method for managing things.
Overtime is now referred to as a 'sprint' when we realize we're behind deadline, but can enjoy the process of sprinting every 2 weeks. We have replaced the boring, planned methodology of milestones and working overtime to fix what we hadn't planned by sprints, where we do overtime on a systematically planned 2-times-per-month basis, and everyone is happy because of the 'focus time' whenever we're not scrumming, and free taxi home at night. We also work shift 2 days per week because that totally helps sleep patterns. Enjoy the early morning and late evening at least twice per month.
If the sprint doesn't work, we just push things to the next release. It seems to keep everyone happy.
Agile tools are so flexible we have to make our own, as our organization is so paranoid and locked-down regarding information security we cannot use anything that doesn't go through an approval chain so many miles long it literally virtually circles the earth several times over. So we resist this, and dedicate 1/4 of all of our resources to beating these out-of-date systems at their own game. A guy said he could do the whole 300 person project in Excel, but we thought maintaining a staff Name-ID-email-telephone table would not totally not work, and kept the 300 people making this system Agile instead, we're just using a single API, after all. Agile is all about the team.
Even our bathroom staff are Agile. When the GM leaves in the evening, all tissue paper is removed from the bathroom, promptly. It is replaced when he returns in the morning. That is keeping a tight, ship.
*All the above is true, if somewhat hastily typed.
Having loads and loads of meetings. Like teaching people to build a car or town with Lego using an Agile methodology. Instead of letting them do it themselves, it was a game-changer on memories of Lego as a kid, the impact was like coming off a waterfall, no, even being in a waterfall.
Improving meetings by doing them standing up with a whiteboards instead of a meeting room glassboard. Not only freeing up precious meeting room space for those teams doing scrums with remote teams that also do stand-up whiteboard scrums on their own, our white boards cost leading to less wear-and-tear, scrums tend to last for 30-60 minutes, improving everyone's cardiovascular system, and we can do them at any time of the day whenever the team lead decides a scrum should be done, damn everyone's productivity, it is all about the scrum and helping everyone get things done. My team lead says Agile is a better method for managing things.
Overtime is now referred to as a 'sprint' when we realize we're behind deadline, but can enjoy the process of sprinting every 2 weeks. We have replaced the boring, planned methodology of milestones and working overtime to fix what we hadn't planned by sprints, where we do overtime on a systematically planned 2-times-per-month basis, and everyone is happy because of the 'focus time' whenever we're not scrumming, and free taxi home at night. We also work shift 2 days per week because that totally helps sleep patterns. Enjoy the early morning and late evening at least twice per month.
If the sprint doesn't work, we just push things to the next release. It seems to keep everyone happy.
Agile tools are so flexible we have to make our own, as our organization is so paranoid and locked-down regarding information security we cannot use anything that doesn't go through an approval chain so many miles long it literally virtually circles the earth several times over. So we resist this, and dedicate 1/4 of all of our resources to beating these out-of-date systems at their own game. A guy said he could do the whole 300 person project in Excel, but we thought maintaining a staff Name-ID-email-telephone table would not totally not work, and kept the 300 people making this system Agile instead, we're just using a single API, after all. Agile is all about the team.
Even our bathroom staff are Agile. When the GM leaves in the evening, all tissue paper is removed from the bathroom, promptly. It is replaced when he returns in the morning. That is keeping a tight, ship.
*All the above is true, if somewhat hastily typed.