Social Glass

I’ve made it my mission in recent months to start doing agile development with my team. We made good initial progress, whereby each Product Manager prioritizes his backlog every three weeks and during our sprint period we “SCRUM” the larger projects (there are too many itemsto colllaborate on everything - maybe this is an issue). For a while this seemed to be working, but there was confusion across the different products that feed into my group as to how we wanted our requirements.

“Do you still want Software Requirement Specifications?” they’d ask.

“No, just give me user stories“.

“What’s a user story?”

“Uh, well tell me a story from the user’s perspective. We’ll collaborate on design and further detail the feature during the sprint period. And remember, you’re a pig and that guy over there’s a chicken.”

“Oh. Well I’d rather just give you an SRS. And why are you talking about farm animals?”

The main issue, as I’ve come to discover, is that people are entrenched in the waterfall method. Strategize, design, build, test, deploy, operate. People find comfort in this model. It’s all they’ve known. So I’ve been challenged as a middle manager to implement agile software development processes. A friend of mine says it’s impossible to do without executive sponsorship. Somebody’s gotta make the product owners do this, otherwise they’ll fall back to their comfort zone.

A long road lies ahead I’m afraid.