Agile Lounge Foreword

A few years ago, with the blessing of my mentor, the late Mike Beedle, I published a French version on my blog of an article he originally wrote in English and shared with the Scrum Alliance group on LinkedIn.

Since then, one of our subscribers let me know that the original English post is no longer available online. The group appears to have removed it, for reasons we may never know. Rather than let Mike's words disappear, I decided to republish them here as an archive worth keeping: a clear call-out of the AIC (Agile Industrial Complex) and of the tyranny of frameworks.

What follows is Mike's article, as he wrote it. Our own Agile Lounge reflections on the scaling of Scrum teams in large organizations come right after.

Enjoy the read!

– A. Frédéric Joly, Agile Lounge®

S_Fe is not Agile. S_Fe is not even Scrum.

by Mike Beedle, co-author of the Agile Manifesto

When we wrote the Agile Manifesto

We said ‘people and interactions’, ‘working software (or solutions),’ ‘customer collaboration’ and ‘response to change’ were important. However, S_Fe does not promote these principles and violates the values of the Agile Manifesto.

S_Fe is not concerned with people and the interactions between them – it’s more of a rigorous and massive process, you know the story!? It does not put people and interactions first: there is no cultural basis for transforming values, there is only a background of processes with deep hierarchies. Totally anti-Agile. That’s why we write it without the “A”!

S_Fe doesn’t require integration and testing every day – even Sprint by Sprint; It is not an architecture of subsumption. Therefore, it encourages tech debt and it is prone to systemic issues like massive delays, building the “wrong thing” and lack of scalability. S_Fe also does not offer structural or temporal choices for enterprise architectures, programs with or without software, or large products / services, to be provided on CDep, CDel, Sprint etc… It is only the choice delegated _RT – and one size doesn’t fit all!!! *NDLR: _RT: Release Train

S_Fe says _RT, is about “flows of value” at the program or portfolio level, but we know that every Scrum team must deliver business value to call itself Scrum. Ah Ah!

Finally, and probably most importantly, S_Fe does not have enough adaptation mechanisms – not even the fundamentals of Scrum – to constantly “respond to change” in true flexibility for real user value applications. If business changes, technology changes, architectural changes, team changes come in the middle of a _RT, you’ll break your neck!

Don’t be fooled – S_Fe is not Agile. S_Fe is not even Scrum. There are many other better choices.

The Agile Lounge Reflection

So! Vlan in the teeth of those who believe, with S_Fe, to make the cultural transformation of the way of working in Agile by adopting “heavy systems” and deviating from the Agile mission and Scrum efficiency.

Like Mike, we believe in real flexibility while reinforcing the values of Agility and efficient methods bringing real value to products, companies and above all to customers and users!

In our many successful mandates at Agile Lounge and its partners, the groupings in large companies that worked well used “Scaling” such as LeSS or even better the flexible SoS (Scrum of Scrum) uniting the strength of several ScrumMasters and Product Owners sharing a real vision of a program or portfolio of products or services. The interaction between the Scrum teams was as healthy and free as in the dedicated teams themselves.

Our team of Agile Loungers Coaches found it important to put forward this post by Mike in the language of Molière in order to contribute to the debate as widely as possible and to set the table for our new Agile Lounge™ brand with the philosophy of Agility that we share in the community.

S_Fe, this false reassuring in the face of change!

S_Fe seems, in Montreal anyway and unfortunately in far too many major North American technological innovation centers, to become the reassuring “SAFE-guard” of business decision-makers who are afraid of “The transformation of the way of working” and the self-management of the teams that produce the added and real value of the products to be delivered to salespeople and especially to the humans using them (User first & #H2H).

Stop being afraid and scaring. Love what you do and share it.

This kind of “framework” dilutes the philosophy and culture behind Agile which makes it FR_Agile! Moreover, everything becomes only Buzzword AGILE and Scrum and we invent stories to justify the inefficiency of what we call “missed successes” in the face of this underhanded resistance to these important values of both technological and human evolution that are: “people and interactions”, “functional software and solutions” and “customer collaboration”

Voilà!