Agile is Fragile, eh!
A poem about how Agile is bought and sold
What an era we are living in full of visionaries, Agile consultants, and evangelists
Everybody trying to sell the same product but labeled as REAL Agile — same Agile but with their style
Same people would bash SAFe on the social media but then would be teaching SAFe classes over the weekend; what a joke, Huh!
Going back to the sales pitch it comes with customer satisfaction and bigger ROI we are gonna train your teams and faster is gonna be their delivery
We have done it before and we can do it for you we will help your teams and business it’s only your budget we are gonna screw
Half sold, thinking of it as a silver bullet and how you’d tell everybody you’ve become agile, you sign up and there comes the shiny consultants line-up
Out of nowhere come the Agile Walls, build lights, and Kanban boards with Stand-ups and Retros happening everybody is looking for meeting rooms, tv, and the electric cords
Oh, we were living in autumn but these colorful sticky notes have brought us spring with DevOps, Automation, Chaos testing everywhere, now we are gonna build great products and Chat Bots
Yes, the consultants do deliver and there is uplift in teams’ productivity but then there is resistance from all those traditional folks and project managers and their in-house community
Software requirement specification and other big documents need some perfection each page becomes a user story and gets uploaded on JIRA and Confluence
With no real autonomy teams are forced to put some Lipstick on the pig and call it a deer to fake it a bit more, every friday, they get some free beer
Soon the budgets run out and the consultants have to leave handing over to the project managers with new Agile certifications who proudly start calling themselves Agile Coaches and scrum masters
After sometime this ‘Agile’ becomes a norm everybody thinks their teams no more perform what do we do now, Agile isn’t working Let’s go back to waterfall or get the new budget approved to look for a better Agile consulting (company) and hire experienced Agile consultants.
Agile is fragile, eh!
Salam is a polyglot poet by passion and an Agile coach (do you see the irony) by profession. For some reason, Medium thinks he’s a top writer in Poetry!