Agile Forest

Ever had that moment whilst Agile Coaching when you just want to /facepalm but you know professionally you can’t.

Here is a list of my more notable moments over a few years (sufficed to say this is not all of those moments):

• A Standup where the Project Manager stood at the front near the story wall and one by one directed his hand to each team member asking ‘So what did you do yesterday?’
• Where I had to explain to a CIO of a 400 person IT group what the difference between a Portfolio, Program and Project was (no, he really didn’t know)
• Where I kicked off an Agile Process Improvement Project that required the IT Leadership Team’s involvement of requirements, setup the initial scoping workshop and was told that it was the first time ever that the Leadership Team had sat in a room together.
• When I informed a team that we were going to invest in training them and received a reply ‘Why? If we are skilled then we would just get a job elsewhere.’
• A Project Manager that Gantt charted over 500 stories across six months of work onto a wall and then continued to ask the team on Iteration ‘x’ why they weren’t working on the stories on the Gantt wall.
• COTS implementations run Agile where Business Process Transition Analysis was not in scope at all. Apparently people figure customisation is better than configuration + process change.

What are your biggest /facepalm moments?