Oh, the endless war.
While principles of both methods can be explained within a paragraph, we see an amazing amount of £2000 courses, which will tell to you that user stories have to be only one user story size big and never bigger. It’s a blasphemy otherwise.
“ACKCHYUALLY, user stories are in SCRUM and SCRUM != Agile.” Doesn’t matter, it’s just a few rules on top of that one paragraph.
Kudos to folks who made online courses on Agile and managed to charge >£200 for that one paragraph written into 50 PowerPoint slides, read by a robot. Or consultants, who will drop off a massive word document for you to follow.
Consultant: “If you do these 15 different meetings and break down all the user stories to one user story point sized stories, then it will work”.
You: “Ehm, we’ve done it and we still have a lot of problems.”
Consultant: “Do you have your retrospective in this format with everyone, even your shareholders there? Is every user story exactly one user story?
You: “…. no… what does that even mean?”
Consultant: “I gave you the framework, you don’t follow it. It’s your fault.”
Why haven’t we solved the obesity crisis in the western world if you just need to eat 6 times a day 250 calories?
Ok, so why are we talking about agile and waterfall so much nowadays? In a lot of cases just think about waterfall as “previous/current process” and agile as “future process after fixing our issues”.
And the conversation starts with “something does not work”. Hopefully, it’s not where it ends.
However, If you are overweight, the advice “just eat less” probably won’t work.
If you have obsessive thoughts, the advice “just don’t think about it” probably won’t work.
Yet we somehow think we can apply a few simple rules and fix problems we haven’t even figured out yet.
Same as personal development is a long journey with a lot of unpleasant inner dialogue, the same is changing the way how an organization work. Think about what kind of mess you are and then extrapolate it to hundreds of you, with different goals, trying to work together.
Should we rebrand Agile Coaches into Organisational Therapists? I don’t even want to google it because there will be someone in the Big Four making a living off it already.
Just above average 