The tasks are to create decks to report at governance meeting about the deadlines for creating decks showing the accountability mechanisms - as shown in a table in a deck. A traffic light report on this in a deck for meeting to monitor all this activity.
We need a deck for that to.
Add that to the action plan.
Put in the meta-deck
We may need to get some consultants in to provide independent view of all this complexity and keep us honest!
The abuse of Agile is a large part of this. Some (let's call them management consultants) have turned that into the least agile process possible. Backlogs are defined from day 1 (or earlier) and stuck to; with small adjustments as it goes but no agility. Senior management (the people signing off on the payments for all this) see
- burn-down charts and whatever else is produced
- shiny playbacks of narrowly-defined objectives that don't join up
The squads are siloed on projects to destroy corporate silos.
As a lowly squad member, I got a task scheduled for 6 hours (reasonable, it was easy) and 13 sub-tasks to achieve and record time against.
This is what happens when organisations confuse activity with progress. When they mistake reporting for rigour. When they reach for more governance instead of more trust.
The thing I noticed how when a project kicks off, it leads you to do the wrong work. The real work is out there or over there and you are staring at and updating artifacts inside a computer.
My favorite was the eventual claim of "scope creep!" No. We just delayed finding it out because our heads were buried in the artifacts. That thing you now claim as "scope creep" was likely there from the beginning.
The bridge analogy is right, but in enterprise AI delivery the coordination layer drowns the work for a specific reason - nobody trusts the system enough to let it run unsupervised.
Every agent decision gets a steering group and every model output gets a status update. The governance isn't theatre for its own sake - it's the organisation hedging against accountability it never defined before the project started.
We need some dates for tasks.
The tasks are to create decks to report at governance meeting about the deadlines for creating decks showing the accountability mechanisms - as shown in a table in a deck. A traffic light report on this in a deck for meeting to monitor all this activity.
We need a deck for that to.
Add that to the action plan.
Put in the meta-deck
We may need to get some consultants in to provide independent view of all this complexity and keep us honest!
The abuse of Agile is a large part of this. Some (let's call them management consultants) have turned that into the least agile process possible. Backlogs are defined from day 1 (or earlier) and stuck to; with small adjustments as it goes but no agility. Senior management (the people signing off on the payments for all this) see
- burn-down charts and whatever else is produced
- shiny playbacks of narrowly-defined objectives that don't join up
The squads are siloed on projects to destroy corporate silos.
As a lowly squad member, I got a task scheduled for 6 hours (reasonable, it was easy) and 13 sub-tasks to achieve and record time against.
All performative, no useful performance.
I fear your experience is not unusual Martin. Agile has become an ideology not a method.
It gives the team leader control over his employees.
Jobs like these are just occupational therapy, or rather, a handbrake for employees, who are prevented from doing their actual work.
This is also a huge handbrake for the entire company.
I'd rather be a “one-man business”!
That "coordination layer" used to be called management. Seems to be a missing skill these days.
You have just described the last 4 decades of NHS reforms
Haha
This is what happens when organisations confuse activity with progress. When they mistake reporting for rigour. When they reach for more governance instead of more trust.
Saved it for later, it definitely hooked me
Thanks for saying it.
The thing I noticed how when a project kicks off, it leads you to do the wrong work. The real work is out there or over there and you are staring at and updating artifacts inside a computer.
My favorite was the eventual claim of "scope creep!" No. We just delayed finding it out because our heads were buried in the artifacts. That thing you now claim as "scope creep" was likely there from the beginning.
Love the scope creep irony Joe
It took me nearly 20 years and some exposure to systems thinking outside of the PjM work to finally say to myself, “Hey! Wait a minute!”
The bridge analogy is right, but in enterprise AI delivery the coordination layer drowns the work for a specific reason - nobody trusts the system enough to let it run unsupervised.
Every agent decision gets a steering group and every model output gets a status update. The governance isn't theatre for its own sake - it's the organisation hedging against accountability it never defined before the project started.
It’s a brave new world 😂