When the business mandates Agile but still thinks Waterfall
To be hip and trendy the latest multi year project I'm involved in is being run on Agile principles. From a coding perspective it's going great. There is a lot of research involved so we really don't have a clear view of what we are doing next and it is pretty dynamic as one analysis methodology might pan out while another collapses. The customer mandated the product be managed using Agile, I'm sure based on the fact that there was a high profile report in their trade association magazine the month before we started saying how Agile was the way to go for any new projects...
So here's the rub. Our senior management keep asking to see the gantt chart and a feature roll out plan for the next two years. We have given them sprint data, burn down charts, access to Epics, Stories and work packages etc in our PM tool, even gone so far as to export things to excel and munge the data to look a bit like a giant chart but still they fail to get their heads around the fact that agile isn't waterfall.
For what it's worth this project would have been much better developed using an iterative waterfall model with 3 to 6 month iterations. As it is our sprints are currently a full month long as we try to get some basic stability into the platform and integrate the primary components. Once it's running we will be able to shorten the sprints and get some serious incremental content delivered. Until then its all a complete cluster fuck trying to keep the new age customer happy, the old age executives happy and still deliver a credible product in the short term.
I just wish people, who don't know shit about delivering projects, would just quit writing articles that purport to show the latest greatest "one size fits all" methodology that absolutely must be used.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
