It's time to break free from Corporate Agile
I'm a bit of a Reddit lurker. I hang around the tech communities. Occasionally, I review memes. You know, serious business. Over the years, I've noticed a shift in sentiment about agile working methods in these communities. “Agile is dead”, they say.
In this article, I'll introduce Corporate Agile as a way to label dark patterns that drive the rising negativity about agile working methods. As a path forward, I will make the case for a return to principles with Basic Agile.
I welcome a change of attitude - too many Agile implementations seem to create significant worker frustration and corporate overhead. It inevitably leads to debates about whether “insert-your-favourite-flavour-of-agile” is inherently broken or poorly implemented.
Nevertheless, I don't think the agile principles are wrong. An agile mindset is fantastic when working under complexity and uncertainty. In circumstances like these, a plan-driven approach isn't helpful because the outcomes of the process are too hard to predict.
As workers in tech, we participate in hard-to-predict Complex Systems because people, markets and new inventions are involved. How can we thrive in such conditions? Well, in an agile spirit, we make headway by:
