I recently left a long-established, mid-sized company that has been stuck in a miserable mire of Scrum that stands as an ironic antithesis to the manifesto the countless (and exorbitantly expensive) agile evangelists we’ve had slink through our doors exhort yet fail repeatedly to achieve.<p>The new company has no formal agile process, but effectively is kanban. I gotta say, it’s glorious. Leadership gives us a clear and actionable goal, we self organize the work, and we approach it in a way where we can iteratively build and release things every few days to maybe a week or two and get it in front of stakeholders for feedback, adjust as necessary, repeat until it’s done. If something urgent comes up, stakeholders are apprised, we handle it, and we return as soon as we can. We have a little bit of documentation to help with the bus factor and onboarding. No bullshit, no scrum master or coach, no planning poker, no fucking stand ups or parking lots or sprint planning or retrospectives or scrum-of-scrum or refinement or the dozens of other meetings that took 1/3 to 1/2 of my time at the old place.<p>We can afford to do this because we’re a small, focused company where everyone knows their role, we get the fuck out of each other’s way but we hold each other accountable, and the pulse of the org is built around this lifecycle. As the business gets larger, it will stress this nice and cozy arrangement and I imagine we may have to add some light process to keep it from spilling apart, but I’m really hoping this ground up culture of getting things done can scale.<p>That’s the thing of it. scrum arose out of people trying to boil down and extract the magic of very successful teams so we can duplicate it everywhere, but in the process of trying to make it a machine you just install and turn on, it has turned a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a Frankenstein monster where various leadership members-who may unfortunately not be as smart or effective as the folks they emulate-pick the parts they like and push it down onto their reports, whether it works organically or not. Worse than that, it gets applied piecemeal across the organization rather than the organization being built around it. And of course they change it unilaterally and don’t coordinate across teams.<p>I think you either have it or you don’t. If you’re waterfall and can’t do anything but waterfall, just do waterfall and don’t make everyone miserable by wasting their time trying to pretend something you're not. If your org isn’t effective, sure, give it a shot, but it’s going to take an organization-wide, focused effort to make agile work. At any rate, I can’t understand or justify the amount of money and time we throw at snake oil salesmen and charlatans in the scrum/project management space.