Unmasking Fake Agile
Many companies boast with an agile work environment when it comes to their work processes. But if you join and start working there, you see that it is all fake. Teams are not really self sufficient or truly cross functional, are sidelined by other decisions, have not enough impact on what is delivered to the customer or in the worst case work directly for the waste bin. You basically have an agile facade by running sprints, keeping a backlog, continuous integration, iterations. But where it matters, it is just fake. Deadlines and decisions are decided elsewhere and innovation and impact is missing. Changing the process from the inside is not possible, retrospectives have no power. Instead of being in the vibrant agile environment you have been promised, you are frustrated and want to leave again.
So how can you spot fakes before joining them?
Software Development Companies
Note: see below for non-software companies.
It depends whether you are considering to join a small company or a middle to large business.
Mid to large companies: ask questions about how to make a career.
For small companies: ask about talking directly to the customer.
Not so Small Companies
The answer to how you make a career will be very different in an agile company and in a fake agile or non agile one. In an agile company, there is almost no vertical career option because the hierarchies are flat and the ‘lowest level’ team has full responsibility on what they build. Careers are based on seniority or then through product architecture, product management or agile process management. These are horizontal career options, not vertical ones.
Large, agile companies also do not have a lot of vertical career options. True agility in large companies can only be achieved by partitioning the company internally into smaller, totally self driven units, which are run autonomously by the staff in a flat manner. You basically create smaller autonomous ‘internal’ companies inside the large one. The limit for that is at 150, max 200 people. If you have a larger internal unit, it will struggle due to the communication overhead of any truly agile company, which grows exponentially with the number of people.
In a large really agile company, ‘Middle Management’ boils down to orchestrating the internal companies and top management sets the culture and very high level goals. It is not easy to achieve but it can be done. Such companies are able to innovate quickly and to keep a very close interaction with their customers.
If the question about career reveals a vertical hierarchy, then the company cannot be truly agile, there will be friction between the management levels and the teams. And too much politics.
Small Software Development Companies
In a small company (less than 150 people) it also makes sense to ask about who is who, about seniority levels and careers, but then you cannot spot easily whether the company is agile or not based on the answer as there will be not enough people for a hierarchy.
So instead let’s focus on customer centricity and customer interaction. If you take agile seriously, every team needs direct customer interaction. You need to be able to get feedback directly from the customers to know that what you build is right. If this is not available at all, not even indirectly, but ‘someone who knows’ tells the teams about use cases and requirements and will also decide whether it is done or not, then you are dealing with fake agile. Because then the team will not be able to participate properly in decision making and innovation.
Non Software Companies
There is a debate in the community whether agile as a methodology can be applied at all to companies outside of software development. Robert Martin says in his latest book ‘Clean Agile’ that in his opinion this cannot be done. He says that writing software is a special kind of work for which the Agile Manifesto was written.
Many non-software development companies build software now, either in-house or near-shore, and a lot of their business starts to depend on their digital platform. The good ones realize that they have to adapt also other parts of their business to be more agile, due to the increasingly digital nature of their business. And to stay competitive of course. You might argue that they become software development companies too, at least to some extent.
However, it does not make sense to force the Agile Manifesto on all aspects of work especially on large companies. It depends on what the ultimate service delivered is, and how the best practice looks like to deliver that service. It may well be that a classical command chain structure is the most efficient way to be competitive.
So when a non software company claims to work in an agile manner, and you are interested in a job not in software development but in another ‘agile’ team, you can find out quickly if they make it or fake it. The two questions above give already some indication as well, and it is a good idea to lead with them.
In addition, ask about how the improvement process works and how they measure it. The hardest part in non software teams is to implement retrospectives that actually have an impact. Often times retrospectives are there, but then the agreed changes are not implemented, because the team has no decisive power to do so, or the requested change is out of reach up in the hierarchy. So you end up fixing stuff on the surface, the truly important changes cannot be done. Ask about what the last changes were that they decided in the team and how they really implemented them, and how much time it took to see results. Fake agile companies will have a hard time coming up with high-impact examples, while true agile ones can easily list several.
If it sounds too good to be true, ask even more questions
If you are a professional looking for an agile environment where you can shine and have an impact, do not be tempted by a job offer that sounds almost too good to be true. Ask even more questions to be sure that you will not waste your time in a fake agile environment.
