and you hit the nail right on the head, I sometimes fallen prey to introducing teams to the practices instead of taking a step back and explaining the objectives, a empowered, responsible and accountable team

So many times I’ve heard managers brag about their ‘Agile’ approach or team, and it turns out to be exactly like the Dilbert cartoon shown.

It’s been very disheartening to watch the term ‘Agile’ degrade over the last 3 or 4 years, from something that had substance and represented a welcome departure from the brain-dead corporate beancounter mindset, to become another code-word for unrealistic deadlines and a total disregard for all the hard lessons of the last few decades as the practice of software has evolved.

If new information is to penetrate, management has to know they do not already know everything.

Kristofer, you’re too kind. I’m rethinking that last sentence you quoted, “You have to trust your teams, even when they don’t deliver the results you expect.” Hmmmm. At what point do you stop trusting? I mean, there are bad developers out there, or good developers organized in really bad ways. I don’t have an instant answer for that, even though it’s the type of thing I’m sometimes called upon to help decide. So thank you for reminding me of that.

I wish everybody – especially in management – at every company tried to understand this…

I particularly liked this part:

“… there has to be an attitude in middle-to-senior management that they don’t know everything, that some things aren’t amenable to control, that surprise is something that should be expected. You have to trust your teams, even when they don’t deliver the results you expect.”

Well done!