Follow this steps to utterly destroy any agile team.
Because no one likes to see a happy, performing agile team doing their stuff. So we take matters on our own hands.
We've all been there, at the presence of a functional, performant Scrum/Agile Team, as a clear thought crystallizes in our minds… I have to destroy this team. Lucky for you, I present here the best weapons of mass destruction that you can use to achieve you evil plans. Ready?
Let's cause some damage at first, setting an unrealistic and unnecessary deadline. Just because it's fun to see the face of the team members after asking Why is this suddenly this important? and you responding Business stuff. You've done great, you let the first shades of confusion hit them. Let's continue.
The next step is quite simple. Just let the Product Owner take control of the team, being the sole responsible for defining things like the entire roadmap and the planning meetings. You team won't like it, but hey… one less thing to worry about for them right? Who understands this so called developers, complaining when you're just letting them care for less things?
While they are still confused and worried, let's just hit them from the inside. Just add a rockstar ninja-guru-jedi-developer to the team, and take his opinion in high regards above the rest of the team. This will definitely break them apart and that's great. Separated they'll fall faster. Their high-performing days are almost over.
Our plan is halfway through. Now we need to start demanding that they keep developing their project, but delay shipping to production as much as you can. This will keep them busy just arguing over something like continuous integrity or some crap like that. Don't listen to them. They deploy when you say it's time to deploy.
In a great effort to show how much you trust on those guys now, we're going to ask some manager or Team Lead to assign individual tasks to developers. They will love this because now they can use the time they previously used to define this, for much more rewarding exercises like reloading LinkedIn.
Time to hit a master blow. Just cancel Retrospectives. Right now. Such a waste of time. Do they want to work on their issues as a team? Well, they can do that in their own goddamn time, those hippies, were they can kumbaya-the-shit out of their problems. They get to the office to type smarty words on colored screens.
Wow! We almost forgot something really important! Every agile-destroying plan worthy of mention, needs to include the ULTRA-HIGH-PRIORITIZATION scheme. This means that from now on, every single story is the most important story. And they better learn how to deal with this becau… UPS THERE IT GOES, another important story just pop up! chop-chop!
By now, they must be confused, untrusting of each other, tired, not knowing what to do next unless being told so. Our plan is almost complete. This is easy, man! As one of our last evil strokes, we will just set a development process as a default, and never discuss it again. Nope, zip, nada. This is THE LAW now and we don't discuss THE LAW.
Finally, the last step. And this is really, truthfully, the greatest one. Just don't leave any slack time. Need to investigate an alternate Database? Too bad. That implementation ended up a little flacky? You should have thought about that earlier. Rebuild something? You're SO fired.
We succeeded! There was absolutely nothing they could’ve done to avoid plain and utter destruction. They’re going to be waterfalling so hard from now on that they’ll start coding under the shower. Another great team destroyed… but our work has just started.
Do you want to keep fighting the good fight against Agile/Scrum?
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