How to get rid of Agile, Lean, Kanban and Scrum. If you know how to get rid of Agile, you are better at protecting it. All change initiatives have to compete with the status quo. How to take a systems/hacker view of change initiatives to find weaknesses you can exploit.

1. Getting Rid of Agile in a Few
Simple Steps
Or what happens when an unstoppable
force meets an immovable object
Hanno Jarvet

2. Know Thyself
• If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can
win a hundred battles without a single loss.
• If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you
may win or may lose.
• If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will
always endanger yourself.
Sun Tzu
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3. Terrain
• The natural formation of the country is the soldier's
best ally;
• but a power of estimating the adversary, of controlling
the forces of victory, and of shrewdly calculating
difficulties, dangers and distances, constitutes the test
of a great general.
Sun Tzu
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4. Terrain
• Status quo
• Organizational culture
• Organizational immune system
• Law of entropy
• Daily focus
• Human nature
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7. Management Issues
• Don’t trust the team or agile. Micromanage
both your team members and the process.
• If agile isn’t a silver bullet, blame agile.
• Equate self-managing with self-leading and
provide no direction to the team whatsoever.
• Ignore the agile practices.
• Undermine the team’s belief in agile.
Source: Mike Cohn and Clinton Keith
www.jarvet.com

8. Team Issues
• Continually fail to deliver what you committed to
deliver during iteration planning.
• Cavalierly move work forward from one iteration to the
next.
– It’s good to keep the product owner guessing about what will be
delivered.
• Do not create cross-functional teams.
– Put all the testers on one team, all the programmers on another etc.
• Large projects need large teams.
– Ignore studies that show productivity decreases with large teams due
to increased communication overhead. Since everyone needs to know
everything, invite all fifty people to the daily standup.
Source: Mike Cohn and Clinton Keith
www.jarvet.com

9. Product Owner Issues
• Don’t communicate a vision for the product to the agile
team or to the other stakeholders.
• Don’t pay attention to the progress of each iteration
and objectively evaluate the value of that progress.
• Replace a plan document with a plan “in your head”
that only you know.
• Have one person share the roles of ScrumMaster and
product owner. In fact, have this person also be an
individual contributor on the team.
Source: Mike Cohn and Clinton Keith
www.jarvet.com

10. Process Issues
• Start customizing an agile process before you’ve done it by the
book.
• Drop and customize important agile practices before fully
understanding them.
• Slavishly follow agile practices without understanding their
underlying principles.
• Don’t continually improve.
• Don’t change the technical practices.
• Rather than align pay, incentives, job titles, promotions, and
recognition with agile, create incentives for individuals to
undermine teamwork and shared responsibility.
• Convince yourself that you’ll be able to do all requested work, so
the order of your work doesn’t matter.
www.jarvet.com
Source: Mike Cohn and Clinton Keith

11. Killing Lean
The Seven Principles of Lean:
1. Eliminate Waste
2. Amplify Learning
3. Decide as Late as Possible
4. Deliver as Fast as Possible
5. Empower the Team
6. Build Integrity In
7. See the Whole
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
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12. Killing Scrum
• Retrospectives
– Blame or stay silent
– Decrease or get rid of altogether
– No resulting action
• Weak DOD
• Long Backlog
• Scrum Master is the Product Owner
• Use Scrum where it adds no value
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13. Killing Kanban
First follow the foundational Core practices
principles
• Start with what you do now 1. Visualize
• Agree to pursue incremental, 2. Limit WIP
evolutionary change 3. Manage Flow
• Initially, respect current roles, 4. Make Process Policies
responsibilities & job titles Explicit
then adopt the core practices 5. Improve Collaboratively
(using models/scientific
method)

14. Case Studies
1. Let’s build the team!
2. Swedish gaming company
3. 3 x 9 months telco cycle
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