I have been laughing at the rollout of Agile in WF.
worked at 2 fortune 10 companies that implemented it...
They did deep dives on each system to determine if they should do agile on them
Instead of shoving it down people's throats..
This has been a classical rollout of someone that had no clue and is just trying to justify their position...
When even FORBES 3 years ago admitted the death of Agile in the promises made ...
We will pay a huge price for this ...
24 replies (most recent on top)
You don't need "across the enterprise testing." You need established contracts and unit tests which validate that systems adhere to those contracts. For the record, WF doesn't have either of those on any appreciable scale, and that's not the fault of Agile. It's the fault of WF being over two decades behind in software development practices.
I also can't help but chuckle at the thought that WF is a leader in the banking industry. We are where folks from the big boys go to retire. The only thing WF is a leader in is rampant fraud and abuse against consumers.
The issue is not with agile, but with WF's implementation of it. Go look at any list of "top 10 agile mistakes" and you'll find WF is doing 7 or 8 of them. We have zero engagement with the business (our PO is fresh out of school, with no knowledge of the business or software development). Management is directing a single, one-size-fits-none approach that all teams must use. Metrics aren't used to find areas that can be improved, but to evaluate, rank, and punish employees, with no concern given for why the metric is trending badly. There's little if any story grooming done, and developers rarely know what is expected of them when they take a "user story," and since they can't speak up, drop or roll a story, they just make a new one for whatever work they didn't get done. We use a bug tracking system to track stories and tasks which, shockingly, doesn't allow breaking large tasks into anything bit a single layer of sub tasks, making breaking down large deliverables into small, visible chunks all but impossible. (The search feature on that bug tracking system is non-existent, so good luck even using titles to try and organize your tasks). Managers frequently decide the number of story points, often with no understanding of the actual work required, and then hound developers when they don't finish the task fast enough.
None of this is "agile." It's the fu----g opposite.
@1hwg+
100% agree, these agile guys do maybe 30min of work a day hosting meetings and always say they're not truly responsible for anything. On our project they had 2 BA's, 1 SW Eng, 1 PO, 1 assistant PO, 1 Scrum Master, 1 Manager, 1 PM. They basically had 5 headcount sitting on top of 3 people doing all the work, that doesn't include the extra managers, PM's, and garbage agile trainers. They didn't know what they were doing and 2 BA's and 1 SW would spend half the day in meetings answering questions from these id--ts, or cleaning up the mess the PO's made in JIRA. Also have you seen the salary of these Agile headcount, they make more money doing 30min of work than the people actually doing the work. People high up should be fired for this disgrace.
Agile will not save Wells Fargo. Stupid is as stupid does. Business is not capable of telling tech what they need or what regardless of the methodology. Business f'ed up waterfall and they will f' up Agile when they finally engage.
we can't even get things done at our current pace how is implementing agile and speeding things up going to help? Additionally the rollout of agile is different in different groups, while technology is going strong with it the business side is taking their time and may or may not be at a point where it is being implemented this you have a hybrid approach that just slows things down even worse
business side here. agile has been a complete joke how it's been done at WF.
Supposed to make us faster and less defects for technology development - no and no.
Just repackaged all of our bureaucracy and inefficiency in different wrapper.
@kgg+1euJ7Jdo spot on. No holistic requirements and tons of rework as a result of that. Ultimately equals slower delivery
When we’re still bloated on staff, once you work on a agile project, you’ll know why. The bloat is with the program managers, scrum masters, agile coaches. Literally 5 people for one big project. It’s a disgrace. What simple jobs they all have too
What is agile?
90% of mature companies adopted Agile immediately under consultant guidance. There were no 'studies' or 'slow openings.'
They went whole hog and made lots of bacon doing it.
Lost lots of good people doing it.
Welcome to a self-destructive Fad.
@kvm what? Fortune 10 (or Fortune 50, Fortune 100, etc) is a pretty common way to narrow the scope of the Fortune 500.
Anyway, Agile is fine, Wells Fargo just has no idea what it is or how to implement it as an enterprise.
Agreed... The problem isn't Agile, it is how it's implemented. If you have stupid bureaucratic processes where no one is actually empowered do anything, then Agile won't help much. And Agile can be planned well, you just have to adjust expectations as things change. When log4j happens, you take other stuff out of Sprint. However, most of the business owners aren't engaged enough to know what is in the Sprint anyway, so dev teams get discouraged.
When it takes 5 different groups that are all in different time zones to change just a damn config setting then a developer has every right to be annoyed and should be given the ability to make the change. Isn't that what agile means? Instead we have to work with 5 other groups who all prefer to scream not my job and instead turn what could have taken a day to fix into weeks to fix. So shove your cowboy comment up your ar-e when the real problem is to many hands in the pot.
People complained about RUP when wells fargo decided to move to it as well...and agile is much better than RUP at handling the issues of high turnover/change of requirements and the entire project goals being changed by the time the design phase gets sorted. Intel did a great job rolling out agile to its tech tiger teams in the 90s. Every single tech company (fortune 5,000 and above) I have worked for has successfully rolled it out. Not sure what the OP is complaining about. I do know that the cowboy developers who hate team work and like to slack don't really like the agile ceremonies. They are free to leave (or be asked to leave)
I’ll try to best summarize project management at WF.
Seriously - this is how it works:
Problem - 10 managers find an issue and assign it to an engineer
Said engineer says hey how can this be, I need help
A project is spun up - adding a bunch of service managers and their bosses
50 folks from risk management say this can't be without process
20 process staff weigh in and complain this is too fast, please we need more time
Lone engineer is given 30 different requests for information
Senior leadership is then updated on the lack of response from said engineer
Engineers Boss informed of low or non response of engineer
Engineer is given a PIP
Whole issue is now a section-wide directive to get results
Contractors are hired at 500/hr to figure out what went wrong
Managers are hired to watch over the contractors
Engineer says sc--w this and gets another job somewhere else
Contractors - after milking the system for 1000 hours says its not an issue
Managers of the contractors agree its "Job well done!"
Bonuses are given to the mangers for fixing the issue
and whatever it was....goes under the rug and all is well.......
It doesn't help Saul is pretty useless at this point, the whole log4j management was so fu---d up. He should be gone for how he handled that alone but trying to force agile on a heavily regulated process is damn near impossible.
Project management here is a joke. I have never seen any actual reqirements that the front line signed off on - systems just roll out "enhancements" built by people not using the system daily. If we can't do that how is agile going to help? Agile is just an excuse not to have a solid plan and timelines. Just a way to evade accountability...
Post ID: @qny+1euJ7Jdo
Okay. Like I said, I lean towards agreeing you. Wells Fargo strives for mediocre, and often cannot even meet that goal.
Believe what you want..
When you judge managers on how many agile projects they have instead of the ROI on each project...you have the truth..
Tell me I am wrong...
Providing more helps identify me...
Post ID: @tqo+1euJ7Jdo
Thank you - I assumed that, but that is not vernacular anyone uses, therefore I consider the OP to be suspect. Additionally, who in the world works for 2 of the top ten companies in the Fortune 500 and then comes to Wells Fargo? 1+1 is not adding up to 2.
Agile is mostly a buzzword at WF I thought..managers name drop it to look good in meetings, but that’s as far as it goes…
Fortune 10..
Top 10 companies in the fortune 500
have not seen anything delivered faster in fact slower, the better the plan the better the execution, not a lot of planning in agile
OP - I tend to agree with you, but your post raises a couple red flags: Fortune 10 Company? Classical rollout?
I’m guessing English is not your first language? Please explain.