Just another sign of the continuing corporatization of MIT (and the rest of academia). Our Dean of Students is now a Vice President, in line with our "peer institutions." At the end of the day, MIT is a corporation, and exists to make money, but it's incredibly irritating when administrators refuse to admit this to students, and frame all debates without that context. "These changes are to make us more similar to our peer institutions" = "we want to make more money".<p>If anyone here is an MIT alum (or boardmember!), please considering getting in touch with current students and seeing how you can help. At this point it's pretty clear we have no voice on campus.
<i>Many managers were demoted from their supervisor roles, likely as part of the changes to make IS&T a flatter organization. However, in several cases, new managers were put in place as soon as their predecessors left.</i><p>Friends of the newly appointed boss, I'd not be surprised. Jobs for the boys.
<i>The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees, he said, which is “completely at odds with the preferences and personalities of much of IS&T’s current leadership.”</i> In my experience Scrum often winds up micromanaging everyone, like at my current large employer. Scrum is often the tool of people who want to say agile but still want full control of everything.
<i>Very</i> good Reddit discussion on this article: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_struggle_within_mits_it_department_over/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_strug...</a><p>I suppose one good piece of news is that it's now possible to fire people working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold War, about the time I left the community as a result of leaving the Boston area).
Usually when you see the word "transformation" bandied about, particularly in a functioning organization, that means that McKinsey, Deloitte and their ilk have been around.<p>Adding some magical methodology change in the mix is just a way to negatively impact the performance of the unit and justify headcount reductions. I'll bet $0.05 there will be a big push to achieve ITIL v3 compliance to fix whatever was broken. Once that happens, outsourcing is pretty easy.
"Reorganize everything to adopt Agile practices" is the managerial equivalent of "rewrite everything using Object-Oriented technologies." Never works as advertised.<p>Also I feel the article really tries hard to paint this John Charles in a negative light but if he indeed spews so many PHB cliches that's scary.
That article is way too long with barely a mention of what's actually pissing people off. Hard for me to get up in arms over this when you bury exactly what it is that's happening.<p>I've been through reorgs like this in two different research university IT groups. It's natural to evolve from the free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days to the current structures of today. There are huge liabilities that were just not important when the entire university didn't rely on IT for EVERYTHING. MIT has some cool stuff going on in IT, but you can't claw back the changes of time, especially with how IT has matured. If I was at MIT, I'd try to find that new field where I could make a mark rather than try to retain the spoils of the past.
>Another former employee said that he decided to leave IS&T when he realized “the organization would never truly be able to adopt agile practices such as Scrum.”<p>I am curious if anyone in software/IT has successfully lobbied management for a "rollback" of agile development methodology?<p>Anecdote: Last year, I was put on as a tech lead for a project; my boss asked me to use Agile to track and manage the project. I tracked the project's tasks as JIRA tickets, but I did not do morning standup's because I did not think I was going to get buy-in from the rest of my team (my workplace has a 2 day work-from-home policy, common hatred on team for meetings, so it's impossible to have everyone meet in person every weekday consistently due to flex-time).<p>I did not do Sprint planning meeting and ticket estimation (Agile poker cards) because people on my team loved to argue over minutiae's and I strongly suspected half of the team didn't know the details of what the other half is working on; So instead, we had a weekly "flowchart" meeting on a large whiteboard where we brainstormed and added more details to our software project (a big data pipeline lends itself to a flowchart); I found it to be a better visualization of the project than a post-it covered poster.<p>Fortunately for me, I had a much senior technical person in my org also lobby also against Agile. The crux of the argument was Agile wasn't well suited for our team; the sprint model of Agile easily lends itself to arbitrary deadlines and building for the "demo" of the story/epic of that sprint and build-up of tech-debt (e.g., build a demo for one sprint, spent next 3 sprints fixing bugs for the features of the first sprint).<p>In the end, management relented and we ended our Agile experiment. Project tracking is done in Google Doc's with milestones instead. I am curious to hear if there are pushbacks in other places against Agile since it is now the de-facto "industry best-practice" (which means consulting should soon come up with newer set of workshops/manifesto's for a "new best-practice).
Sad to hear this happening. MIT IST was unparalleled when I was there. Everyone was knowledgeable, they would go out of their way to help regardless of whether or not it was within their job description, and they delivered a strong product that reliably powered the institute. Hopefully this isn't too disruptive, ultimately, although it sounds like a lot of damage is already done.
Has forced Agile ever turned out well at an organization? I've seen this done many times before and I've never seen it work well. Organizations typically end up shoehorning waterfall into whatever stuff the consultants sold them. I think Agile can work with the right group of people but not getting buy-in from the ground-up is very dangerous and can really demoralize a shop.
This article describes some seriously clueless agile practices.<p>A massive reorg and restructuring dictated from the top to enable agile, a bottom-up methodology.<p>They dictate that everyone must do Scrum - even support departments for which it's laughably mismatched - rather than allowing any level of team-driven process selection, and then 9 months later they open it up to allowing teams to choose, including letting them choose waterfall. Their messaging was this was always the plan, which is either a lie as apparently many people at MIT believe, or evidence that of even deeper cluelessness.<p>My opinion is that this Charles character has no business running a technology org.
In the article comments there is a link to an org chart from 2014-09 with those who have departed or been demoted as of 2016-02 marked [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartures.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartu...</a>
MIT '07 here. Interesting read, and speaking from my own experience I can kind of see both sides of the issue.<p>(Also, to be clear, this is about the department that provides the IT infrastructure and tech support to MIT, not the EECS department at MIT.)<p>I always thought the IT setup at MIT was a little weird. As an MIT student you chose a campus-wide Athena account name. I liked that you could choose anything (mine was the same as my user name here, not just gdurazo or something like that). There were Athena clusters (computer labs) all over campus that you could log into, but it seemed like it ran an old version of some Linux distro, I forget which. You could also ssh in via `athena.dialup.mit.edu`.<p>But you didn't really need to use it all that often. If a class required Matlab, or something, you would log in to use it, but I don't really remember using it for much more than that.<p>I can certainly see the argument that IS&T should do more programming - MIT didn't have that great of a scheduling system or framework for classes to host their assignments and lecture notes, etc. So more custom development could definitely help the student and professor experience.<p>On the other hand, the underlying infrastructure worked great. The internet was fast everywhere, WiFi was fast and open and free, and you could request static IPs and host stuff. It's definitely what you'd expect from MIT. In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of its contents, which was enough for me.<p>I hope the outcome of this is MIT provides more web services for students for class registration, scheduling, submitting assignments, etc. But I hope it doesn't gut the fast and free infrastructure that was there and the great and friendly tech support.
Someone needs to watch "The Death of Agile"[1] by one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k</a>
Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-universities-are-not-businesses-look-who-the-richest-ones-are.html" rel="nofollow">http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...</a>
TIL MIT graduates quite frequently (from the sound of it) go on to work in tech support. Does it pay well enough to make sense as the outcome of what must be the most expensive higher education in the world?
Uh, one if the employees said:<p>"In the words of my people … offer me money … power too, promise me that. Offer me anything I want … I want my managers back, you son of a bitch."<p>If that's what she said, I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic!