Agile Scrum is not working An Article by Gene Bond iism.org The Agile founders had it right, one size doesn't fit all. What the founders perhaps didn’t foresee, or couldn’t agree on, is that in order for the world to scale and consume their wisdom, it had to be packaged as concrete practices, not as abstract classes with virtual methods to be defined in context. And to the proponents of Agile Scrum, give them their due, for their part, they made it concrete – Agile Scrum has been packaged and delivered. Yet much work remains to realize the promise of Agile, which in summary is, the realization of wise use of lightweight development practices and workflows that flexibly adapt to the changing and evolving needs of customers. Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness agile
It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity An Article by Cal Newport www.newyorker.com The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase. Efficiency is the Enemy productivity