Agile has changed

Introduction

Agile was light, free, breezy. It let developers take a deep breath and do what they felt was right. It was liberating. Teams could self-organise with analysts, coders, programmers, trainers, designers, testers, support staff all being skills rather than individuals in different teams in the hierarchy.

But agile has changed. Tobias Meyer was right about certification and professional bodies: it is just going back to how it was. Lots of 'managers that are not called 'managers', lots of performance metrics to measure people, new interventions from different angles instead of a simple rhythm of plan, execute, reflect.

We now have:

• Squads. These were what we used to call the development team. They were self-organising, responsible for their own development and research into methods. They were empowered and trusted to do the right thing because they knew how.
• Chapters. Before agile there were teams of programmers and testers and so on. In agile there were self-organising teams of people using the skills that were needed to get the job done. Now agile has matured, there are teams of programmers and testers and so on, but they are called Chapters. They now have managers, unlike in agile, but like they did before agile.
• Chapter Leads who are responsible for the personal development and performance of those with a particular skill. So it is the staff manager of the programmers or testers or whatever. That's how we used to do things, before agile. If they are hands on, then they are what used to be the Senior Programmer or Senior Tester.
• Agile coaches. It used to be that developers would read the Agile Manifesto, say "That's how we should do it" and got on with it. Now they have to be managed in How To Do Agile. That's not what agile was about.
• Tribes. The squads are organised into Tribes. It's like the old-style hierarchy where you grouped up teams according to the customer or product they worked on. Instead of the Financials System department comprising the Purchasing Module Team and Sales Module Team, now it is the Financials System Tribe and Purchasing Module Squad and Sales Module Squad. Totally different from before agile.
• Tribe leadership. What we used to call 'senior management'.
• Product Owners. Used to be the customer. Now it is an analyst, like in the days before agile.

What this has done is turn agile into the worst kind of pre-agile environment: matrix management. Worse than hierarchical, it is a chaotic mix of people being responsible to multiple managers in different ways, with managers focused on high performance delivery, not on the people. Well done, Spotify, on turning agile against the developer and turning people into productivity machines again.

Thankfully, I see people in Chapter Lead positions adopting best practice from before agile too: what used to be called the inverted manager model is called servant leadership. The idea that happy people are productive people and looking ater the staff and their development increases productivity. That's just Supervision Class 101 stuff: the X & Y type of manager, or the carrot and stick models. Be nice to your staff and they will be better staff. That's how we did things well, before agile. But it ain't agile.