Agile Devil's Workshop

Hello Little Devils,

After a short break, you guru is back again. I have been travelling the world noticing poor team member souls trying to be efficient while working as an Agile Team.

Oh ! The kind me ! I cant see my lovely denizens being in such a pain. So, today I am going to tell you some secrets about how to make the agile team ineffective so that these poor souls can get back to their old tested ways of siloed existence .

Destroy the Alarm clocks ( and outlook reminders :-X):

Following all the meeting timings and promised deadlines is for dumb robots. The agile team members are humans. They ought to have their own timelines , own calendars to follow and own things to do … and if they still don’t agree, remind them of their beloved agile principle

“People and Interactions” matter more over “Processes and Tools”

All meetings should include everyone in the team and should be at least 1 hour long :

Small meetings are so boring. You just have to be very attentive and listen  in a small meeting. My lovely team members are so busy in their work everyday that they deserve some rest. So , what better place than a meeting to relax those overworked minds. To help them, make sure the meetings run into at least an hour, have no fixed agenda and some people are allowed to talk as much as they can.  This would make sure my team member friends can sleep well while in meeting. You see

“A relaxed mind breeds innovation and a busy mind breeds bugs”

No Plans :D:

These Agile coaches preach that be ready for the change, plans or useless. So lets give them a taste of their own medicine !!!!!

My devils, you ought to make sure all the team plans are high level and don’t ever let them know that one of the team’s responsibility in a sprint planning meeting also includes creating a sprint plan with all task dependencies and expected timelines for each story completion.

Their unawareness will make sure they are running mini waterfalls in sprints, relaxing in the first few days and then running crazy in last days of sprint..This would provide them some well deserved rest and gratification to us devils..isnt it … ?

Keep the hierarchies intact:

This Agile is just a passing thing. All the experience people earn over the years matters more. So, that means the newbies need to be controlled and tamed to make sure they work in the right way. The managers and team leads need to be there to keep an eye on the little mischief mongers. From their grey hair, they best know who is suited for what task…So…the hierarchies and the  authority needs to be there to make sure everything runs smooth as silk.

Set higher expectations:

Agile Gurus says teams work more efficiently when they are using Agile. Why Not ?

That means they can accomplish more work in same time. That means our sales guys can earn money for the company by committing lesser timelines and more work. We need to make sure each team member is loaded at least 150%(the more loading, more efficient the team member is) … and believe me they can do that…after all they are  agile….and if they fail, we would get out chance to blame Agile and throw it out of the window…so lets do it 😀 😀 😀 😀

OK ! enough of lessons. Now get out to the field and start implementing these fast…We have very less time left. This agile thing is spreading its tentacles and I am scared…GO GUYS ! Lets destroy Agility before it kills us…

Yours

Agile Devil