The more and more I work in Agile the more I realize that the way many companies use it it is just an excuse to do micromanagement and attempt to treat everyone as an interchangeable resource/cog. Now this doesn't mean agile is bad, it just means for whatever reason management in many of my experiences has twisted it into a tool that seemingly leads to the following:
- Change direction every sprint to the point where an application has been morphed so many times into something new that it makes it a heroic task to actually engineer something that ends up performant without needing a complete rewrite
- Takes the pressure of the business/management folks to project, plan or foresee anything because they believe they can change direction at any point in time
- Cut down projects into such fine grained tasks that it takes the fun out of the work
Im sure in those cases agile was done wrong for whatever reason or another but consequently as a result of my experiences I've stopped putting up with it when I can. I'm definitely ignorant about project management but Ive found within a small team just talking and coordinating like normal human beings about how your going to work together and what your going to do works pretty well. I guess I'd call my approach the "no project manager" technique.
I used to work at a company that absolutely loved to do a variation on your first point. When faced with a multiple choice question, the answer would end up being "all of the above," but framed in such a way that "oh, we're merely keeping our options open." When that story comes up for implementation, what do you know but apparently MajorCustomer has heard all about how we're offering support for every computer ever made by human hands and is thrilled! They want to know when they can expect a demo!
Agile can also be a great way to uncover people who think they are "separate but more equal" too, when they decide that the concept of a sprint whose content is mutually agreed upon and doesn't change mid-stream is just a quaint little detail that doesn't apply to Important People.
- Change direction every sprint to the point where an application has been morphed so many times into something new that it makes it a heroic task to actually engineer something that ends up performant without needing a complete rewrite - Takes the pressure of the business/management folks to project, plan or foresee anything because they believe they can change direction at any point in time - Cut down projects into such fine grained tasks that it takes the fun out of the work
Im sure in those cases agile was done wrong for whatever reason or another but consequently as a result of my experiences I've stopped putting up with it when I can. I'm definitely ignorant about project management but Ive found within a small team just talking and coordinating like normal human beings about how your going to work together and what your going to do works pretty well. I guess I'd call my approach the "no project manager" technique.