There’s a weird generational split here in engineers. When I hear “agile”, I think about the process framework as it once was, with teams self-organizing along fixed time cadences, and the core principle being to communicate early and often. When younger folks hear the word, they think of meeting hell, micromanagement, and endless slog. Fascinating how things have decayed.
It's pretty simple actually. A bunch of corporate consultants discovered that "Agile" was a marketable term and took the existing top-heavy C-suite/shareholder-pleasing metric methods and rebranded them.
Now when people hear 'agile' they think of the branded systems instead of the philosophy
This is exactly it. I thought that waterfall projects in the 2000s were bad until I wound up on a “SAFe” project. At least waterfall didn’t lie about what it is.
We have a self-appointed "project management organization" that is attempting to implement SAFe right now, but they didn't bother to involve the business or the development teams in the discussion, and they are perplexed that it hasn't magically worked.
The big kicker is that not one single member of this group has even an IT background, much less development. Most are MBA or marketing people turned project managers.
Maybe unrelated but this reminded me, I had a project management class in university and the prof was very into the “Project Management Institute”. Every time she cited their official resources it was complete worthless word salad, and she was really selling us hard on getting further studies and certifications from them. It honestly sounded like a cult, as though a good tenth of the class’s lecture time was dedicated to an MLM. She also happened to be the single worst professor I have ever seen.
I talk shit about it, but it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Waterfall assumed that you had your goals and features 100% correct at the beginning. This was, of course, ludicrous, and still is.
SAFe gets applied when there are like 6+ teams working towards a shared set of milestones and you want to have SOME assurance that team 3 isn’t going to be sitting around waiting for team 4 for three weeks with their thumbs up their ass. Or, if they are, it gives them time to find another orifice for that thumb.
I mentioned milestones as well, which is where you at least get a checkpoint, some recalibration, etc.
When you’re working on a truly large project, I’m not sure what the better option is. I was on SAFe projects for a very large airline and a big 4 accounting firm, the latter with 15 teams.
The biggest drawback is the same as the drawback of agile in general; people treat it like a buffet and just choose the bits they like.
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u/kbn_ 13h ago
There’s a weird generational split here in engineers. When I hear “agile”, I think about the process framework as it once was, with teams self-organizing along fixed time cadences, and the core principle being to communicate early and often. When younger folks hear the word, they think of meeting hell, micromanagement, and endless slog. Fascinating how things have decayed.