Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier

I imagine when something about the project changes, it takes a really long time to rewrite all those stories? Or you end up never re-assessing because it takes too long.

I used to think that the words you mention are the problem causing so much bureaucracy. My thinking has changed such that I don't blame the vocabulary, instead I blame the people who abuse it.

There are genuine people who use these buzzwords you mentioned because it makes it easier to discuss concepts/aspects of project management. It's faster to say "user story" than to say "an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system" (from Wikipedia), or to describe all the additional context that "user story" evokes in a person.

You're right that concepts can be misused and end up in a totalitarian environment. That's because the people at the top want it that way. In my experience, they don't want to (or can't) dive into the context of all of their teams and prefer to seek a one-size-fits-all approach.

At my last job there was a new CTO hired about a year before I got there and he started a Scrum initiative on the whole organization. They hired a PMO (Project Management Officer) and a slew of Scrum Masters. Half of the Scrum Masters I worked with were genuine people who wanted to help their teams and knew that by-the-book Scrum wasn't going to work. Those Scrum Masters left within a few months because they kept being told to force policies that were doomed. People argued, but the CTO and PMO didn't budge and problems never got addressed.

If you ever create your own company and you want to prevent bureaucracy, I think focusing on vocabulary will not be very effective. Focus more on keeping your ego in check, constantly push flexibility, and test the unusual ideas of your workers. However, if you have run-away success, any of your own attempts to wrangle bureaucracy will be hampered by size. Delegating anti-bureaucracy could be hard (and counter-intuitive).

I love the discussion happening here. I am into projects which "follow agile model" more than last 5 years, however every time I bring up such questions to folks who are die hard fan of these buzz words (mostly non-engineers), I am threatened to be sent to days long Agile/SAFe training again and looked down upon blaming I have "Old school waterfall mentality".

I am not saying Agile does not have any value at all. I think it helps middle management (top management only see some high level slides) get some numbers to measure how much work has been done and how much time is remaining to complete the features in the road map (epic progress). On the flip side everyone else forced to make those numbers good (either by working on weekend or taking short-cut with tech debts or in worst case compromise quality). This becomes obvious when managers set rules like - 90% of the stories must be completed at the end of two weeks sprint (if there are less than 10 stories, you have to close all of them). I see all stories coming to code review , merged, deployed , tested & closed on the last day of the sprint. Even if engineers believe do not believe its going too fast (superficial review, lack of manual testing) scrum master end up make it happen as his job is to make sure "sprint commitments" are met.

Now enter the world of SAFe. You plan for 3 to 5 months and can't do anything different in this time period (Where is the agility ?). You can't prioritize tech debts that you carried when you took shortcuts earlier to deliver MVP as "things are going alright". Hence, no iteration , only look ahead deliver more features. Spend a week on just planning and trying to accommodate feature based on "High level estimate" which is usually 50% accurate because you have not broken down to stories yet or has not done any experiments to check if some technology or recipe works or not. In addition to this you have hours of grooming, standups planning, retro , review in each up coming sprint involving the whole team.

I think every time you fit a process which may have worked in auto-mobile industry to software industry trying to "get more value " (lean is a new thing) you cease to be an innovative company.

Honestly, most agile people don't think safe is agile.

It was literally created to try to fit agile methods into company that still thinks in waterfall.

You haven't seen cargo cult until you've worked in an organisation with a pmo, and tranditional project management.

I had to literally write a 5 page business case for relatively small features that takes more than 5 days. You then had to get it approved by the pmo board. These people have no product management skills either.

Once it's a approved I have to write a full plan and schedule.

Companies like this exist.

This is what agile was a reaction to.