Back in September 2014, Erik Meijer, a Dutch computer scientist, gave a remarkable keynote speech at Reaktor Dev Day in Helsinki, Finland. It began with a claim that “Agile is a cancer that we have to eliminate from the industry”. You can follow the full video at Vimeo . This speech incited a large number of web discussions about who is right and who is not, who does and who does not understand Agile, but the most of those discussions missed the main point. The challenging opening was an overture to the main idea, and that is ‘One Hacker Way’. It contains – as may well be expected from a keynote speech – provoking, disputable and controversial statements, but also some very intriguing stuff. I would say: listen to the message, try to understand it and do not judge from a holy Agile corner.
Signs of a failing project: recognise some?
P.M.S.S. “Sheetanic” on her maiden voyage.
– Will or cannot deliver on time.
Poor or missing requirements: not being able to describe and decide what is needed.
Unrealistic schedule / budget: both ways – overestimate or underestimate, mostly the latter.
Scope creep: not being able to keep within the requirements and allowing the scope to grow.
Bad attitude: thinking that the project is a waste of time, not committing, even being hostile?
People leaving: abandoning ship is connected to above, but with knowledge going away.
Product failures: the product worked on shows too many failures, defects and issues.
Lack of interest – both customers and project team.
Poor communication – formal or informal; also people not talking to each other.
Lack of velocity – things not moving, not having a fast moving team.
A “no bad news” environment – a culture where bad news is slow going upwards.
Missing concrete signs – dashboard preventing the green-green-green and last minute red.
Lots of overtime – working overtime, in free time, stress going up, health going down.
Diversion of resources – people pulled off project, by management or themselves.
Metrics missing – no use of standard metrics like cost ratio and schedule ratio.
Scope changes – scope creep, seep or crush; requirements may change, though.
There’s no Vision Guy in the first place.
Project goals less important than corporate politics.
Nobody knows what success looks like.
Anything risky rejected out of hand.
Do you recognise some of the above? Well, it is time you did something about it, then. But what? Stay tuned.
Your project does not work… Cargo Cult maybe?
Your project does not work and you cannot figure out why. Is it possible that your team and you are victim to the Cargo Cult science? … They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work… Reading Richard Feynman’s commencement address given at Caltech in 1974 may give you some clues and inspiration.
Always connected worker. Is this good?
Megan M. Raftery of KellyOCG published an interesting study on The ‘Always Connected’ Worker. It seems that many of us do not believe this is improving productivity, and even more are feeling stressed and pressured as a result. Read the full report here. She has more on that topic, check out her blog.