Capital One lays off most of its Agile squads. Guessed they figure out that the consultants were selling crack. Ours is a joke , we are not Agile. We are a hodgepodge of tasks with no strategy. We should abandon this losing proposition and look at centralizing certain functions and services.
11 replies (most recent on top)
The bank was sold Agile and management is too old and stupid to understand that it would never work or improve anything. Are projects now being completed faster and with fewer errors? Customer happiness score dramatically improved? Of course not. On to the next stupid idea because upper management doesn't understand how useless middle management is.
The constant re-orgs and fresh trainees (staff and contract) don't help. You have a lot of people that don't know what their silo does, let alone help others understand what they are supposed to know and do. SMEs are undervalued and unappreciated. Management thinks it takes a few weeks to create an SME and moves them around so much, no one has deep knowledge of the old technology systems. Management disrespects and overworks SMEs at every opportunity. Because there is an unending bucket of need, SMEs tend to keep to themselves and help as little as possible. Agile has made the situation far worse.
Agile was never going to work at USBank. Great concept but USBank has never been able to break the old paradigm. There is no real collaboration between departments and rather than figure out how to break down the silos, management chooses to re-organize. Which only exacerbates the problem. Nobody really knows what anyone else does and everyone is afraid to admit it. Developers are hired who can't speak English and no one can help them navigate the organization because everyone is just hanging on to their little domain. What a mess. I'm so glad to be out of it.
I'm so glad I'm out of there.
At a normal company, Agile is fine. At the bank, systems are so old, complex, with no experts, it's a disaster.
Moving to agile accomplished nothing and made work life far worse. Huge loser for the bank. Management should pay the price.
Got word they’ll be out soon.
Delay was due to sunk cost fallacy thinking, no more.
Good luck.
US Bank should follow suit and eliminate the entire agile job family. This is the worst implementation of agile I have seen. I have done a significant amount of consulting with many less than stellar agile experiences, but whatever US Bank is doing is unbelievably bad.
Agile is a religion. A money making religion for those that promote it. All it did at the bank was add another layer of bureaucracy to an already inefficient system. The people that brought this to the bank never have to prove how happiness, efficiency, productivity, and quality have gone up. Real numbers to justify their existence and cost. The managers that brought this to the bank, twenty years after it was created, should also have to prove that their changes improved something. No, they will just move on to the next stupid idea and fail again. Agile at the bank is a failure.
Can you be more detailed?
I would say “hodgepodge of tasks with no strategy” describes about 80% of corporate America.