The Tyranny of Taylorism and how to spot agile lies

Even those that developed and industrialised waterfall no longer believe it has value, and they still struggle with the tyranny of Taylorism.

While 81% of all development shops say that they are adopting agile, the reality is far from it; only 22% do short iterations, 16% have ordered backlogs, & 13% do retrospectives! They still lack feedback loops.

This talk will take a walk through history from 1890 through to the present and follow the rise and eventual fall of Waterfall in the very organisation that developed it; the US Military-Industrial Complex. From communities through the industrial revolution, mechanisation of the workforce, the first MBA's, the pursuit of hierarchical plan-driven solutions, and bureaucracy to the realisation of reality and the struggle to change.

Overview:
1880 - Social, Family, Community, Problem Solving
1890 - Industrial Revolution and mechanisation of the workforce
1906 - First MBA and enshrinement of the carrot and the stick
1920 - First ideas that people are different ridiculed
1950 - Sequential work adopted by US Military
1970 - Waterfall defigned and adopted
1993 - First Scrum Project
2001 - Agile Manifesto
2010 - Consultation on new DOD procurement rules
2013 - New Procurement rules mandating iterative delivery go live
2018 - Detecting Agile BS
2019 - USAF Memo
Future - Social, Family, Community, Problem Solving

Best at 90 minutes, also works at 60 & 45 but with less detail

How Agile needs to fight back

Agility and self-organisation were beaten to a stalemate by hierarchy and command & control. We must fight back but can't do that while continuing to frame complex red practices in a complicated blue context.

Slaying the dragons and how to successfully descale at scale

Many organisations don't really want to change how they do business and believe that they can continue on how they always have while still getting better at delivering software. They are wrong!

While there are organisations that are successfully scaling out there, they are few and far between. What are the commonalities between these organisations and how have they managed to get past the illusion of scaled agile to the values and principals that are allowing them to leave their competitors in the dust?

To go big, you have to go small!

Focus: many teams, pushing responsibility down

first public delivery, focus on many teams

Agile Evolution: An Enterprise transformation that shows that you can too

“That would never work here.” You’ve likely heard this sentiment (or maybe you’ve even said it yourself). Good news: change is possible. Martin Hinshelwood explains how Microsoft's Azure DevOps Services formerly VSTS went from a three-year waterfall delivery cycle to three-week iterations and open sourced the Azure DevOps task library and the Git Virtual File System.

There is a lot we can learn both from Microsoft's success and failures in moving towards Scrum, Agile, & Continuous Delivery.

Focus: DevOps Story / Journey of Microsoft to CD

Agile is Dead, and the Rise of Zombie Scrum

Agile is dead! Long live DevOps! Um.. ALM… um…

There has been a plethora of "agile is dead" of late posts yet the long list of failed agile that has caused it smell very little like agile. What was missing? Come and find out how to make a success of your agile project, and what will immediately spell disaster…

Paying lip service to a lexicon is no longer enough…

Focus: Zombie Scrum, one team

https://nkdagility.net/Techorama19-ZombieScrum

Agile Evolution: Live Site Culture & Site Reliability at Azure DevOps

With the shift-left movement pushing more responsibility to the engineering teams what practices will help them cope with running a production site. These are the experiance of the Azure DevOps Services team and their journey from on premises to a fully fledged SAAS solution and wjay they need to do to run it and build trust with their customers.

We will cover the importance of transparency, telemitery, on-call, and how to protect your feature teams from disruptions without them loosing touch with production.

Focus: many teams, big public services, build-test-run