Calling out my potential bias[es] up front: I am a former certified scrum master. I let it expire intentionally. I don't necessarily dislike Agile/scrum but I think it has a lot of weaknesses that aren't addressed, and it gets applied as a panacea in instances that might be better served with waterfall or some hybrid.
> Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress.
Agile is one of those things that seems like a dream for micromanagers, and if the extent of your company's Agile implementation is saying that you "do Agile" then yeah it's going to be a nightmare. But Agile teams are supposed to be largely self-organized and self-managing. I don't want to No True Scotsman this but if you're doing Agile right there's very little room for some external micromanager to impose their will upon you, but there's certainly room for one to crop up internally.
An old coworker used to say that Agile was created by someone who was sexually attracted to meetings. We don't do a lot of them, or we do them with a subset (on our team of ~11 including the manager and analysts, backlog grooming is 2-3 people for example).
> Besides being a dream for micromanagers, it seems to be more about signalling progress vs. actually making progress.
Agile is one of those things that seems like a dream for micromanagers, and if the extent of your company's Agile implementation is saying that you "do Agile" then yeah it's going to be a nightmare. But Agile teams are supposed to be largely self-organized and self-managing. I don't want to No True Scotsman this but if you're doing Agile right there's very little room for some external micromanager to impose their will upon you, but there's certainly room for one to crop up internally.
An old coworker used to say that Agile was created by someone who was sexually attracted to meetings. We don't do a lot of them, or we do them with a subset (on our team of ~11 including the manager and analysts, backlog grooming is 2-3 people for example).