Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

Wells Fargo is not doing the industry standard Agile, but they invented a totally different kind of system, which they call Agile, to control and abuse employees.

So Wells Fargo is not doing the industry standard Agile, but they invented a totally different kind of system, which they call Agile, to control and abuse employees.

Agile at WF seems to have turned into a way of enforcing extreme top-down micromanagement. It puts the power in higher level management or a few leaders that have a narrow view of the system. Wells worked better when teams controlled their work, their strategy, and their workplace logistics. EVERYTHING is controlled at the top now: where you work, where you live, what you work on, how you do your work, where the blame is placed, and your review and compensation.

I blame it on incompetent India team. Everything is their fault.

@cxo+1tbJKJAe

The leadership that brought in Agile and the Product Model are the ones who keep barking orders that don’t fit into how they say they want things to work.

All the backlog grooming and sprint planning doesn’t matter when some TLT member gets a hair up their backside and wants something new done in a rushed manner. It just doesn’t work when escalations constantly overrule planning.

It’s all about micromanagement to identify teams they think they can reduce headcount for cost savings.

Agile is not the root cause of why WF is failing. The major reasons are:
(1) Toxic leadership
(2) Low quality offshore teams.

@zfe+1tbJKJAe, Agile can be scaled up if we properly apply the concept of Scaled Agile with Kanban and DevOps. But the problem is that Wells Fargo is not capable of adopting that approach.

@zfe+1tbJKJAe Kanban is almost always better suited for Operations type work.

Agile was never meant to scale up across tech from its dev roots.

In my case, applying Agile to Tech Operations work is perfect evidence of square peg/round hole. The whole point of Operations is to maintain the health of systems. We aren't creating features and improving applications. We are simply tasked with keeping the environment that is used to develop upon healthy and reliable. 99% of our work is not time sensitive or costing the company money by not doing something.

Agile in Operations equals Hack 'N Slash. It is an excuse to be sloppy. It creates unnecessary panic and attention on regular day to day tasks that need little more than a yawn, click, done.

Our Agile output equals increased problem tickets and outages. This creates all reactive-type actions to clean mistakes up. Since Agile is used for the entirety of work, we have issues from implementation to cleanup creating endless tickets passed around like a hot potato. Root cause analysis? How funny you should ask! Agile is the root cause.

Agile is a disaster, an insult to those who want to (and can) reduce problems and outage rates.

The real and unspoken reason agile exists is because "the business" are almost always warm body dolts that can't define what they need. So instead, let's define tiny little nuggets on a daily basis, and call it "agile" so that we can shield the untalented "business" from embarrassment.

Just so you know, WF does not do agile, it's name only. Like other posters say, the biggest problem seems to be the toxic political culture created by the leadership. I am in COO, and I know for a fact that our leadership is totally corrupt at all level.

Agile is old as dirt at this point. It's mindless, cultish groupthink. It is not a benchmark for how things should be done.

For example, why can't you have both working software and comprehensive documentation? Answer: you can!

Agile came about in the early 2000s. It's over 20 years old now. It might be new to Wells (pathetic) but it's not considered "new" or "modern" to the outside world.

As much as I believe in agile, I've lost faith that we'll ever actually be able to transition. It will never work as long as we remain top-down command and control with leaders who continue to ignore the new way of working. There needs to be a mindset shift across the board and it just isn't happening. We're trying to fit scrum into waterfall and we're all mired in the worst of both worlds. If anything, it seems as though mandates, deadlines and pressure is getting a lot more aggressive without a proper process needed to execute well. At least with Waterfall and traditional project management everyone seemed to be on the same page. Comparatively at least. This is just a mess.

Yeah, we don't do agile. Using jira and calling it scrum doesn't make it agile. There is too much command/control, competing priorities, tech resources are pulled into prod issues, and many other problems; too many to list.

@xjq+1tbJKJAe

Yep, fear is the leadership style around here. It is a recipe for disaster.

Yes. You can't run a business on fear either.