“Agile” Does Not Work for You? Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman

Your team is supposed to use an agile approach, such as Scrum. But you have a years-long backlog, your standups are individual status reports, and you’re still multitasking. You and your team members wish you had the chance to do great work, but this feels a lot like an “agile” death march. There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Worse, fake agility is the norm in our industry.

Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel; let’s delve into Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman! (Read online.)

📺 Watch the video now: Tackling Fake Agility w/ Johanna Rothman — 59. Hands-on Agile Meetup.

🎓 Launch on May 30, 2024: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact in the Advanced Product Backlog Management Course!

👉 Please note:

• The course includes membership in a new community of agile professionals.
• The course will only be available until June 6, 2024, for sign-up!

Abstract: Tackling Fake Agility

Your team is supposed to use an agile approach, such as Scrum. But you have a years-long backlog, your standups are individual status reports, and you’re still multitasking. You and your team members wish you had the chance to do great work, but this feels a lot like an “agile” death march.

There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Worse, fake agility is the norm in our industry.

No one has to work that way.

Instead, you can assess your culture, project, and product risks to select a different approach. That will allow you to choose how to collaborate so you can iterate over features and when to deliver value. When you do, you are more likely to discover actual agility and an easier way to work.

The learning objectives of Johanna’s session on Tackling Fake Agility were:

1. Have a clear understanding of the different lifecycles and when to use each.
2. Be able to assess your project, product, and portfolio risks.
3. Know how to customize a lifecycle based on the unique culture and requirements of the team.
4. How to create shorter feedback loops in any lifecycle for product success.

🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — May 7, 2024

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a one-day official Scrum.org class for advanced Scrum practitioners and agile coaches, including the industry-acknowledged PSFS certification. This PSFS training class is in English.

Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CEST.

Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — May 7, 2024.

Customer review: “Great experience – “You reap what you saw.” What I really liked about it was the constant usage of facilitation techniques & Liberating Structures to engage all participants & harness the collective knowledge while reaching the goal of the exercises during the workshop. Therefore, my experience was great because I could really leave with some insights from the whole group that I could apply in my daily work starting from the next day. “You reap what you saw” and in this case, it was the collective intelligence of everyone in the training class.” (Link.)

Questions & Answers

During the Q&A part on Tackling Fake Agility, Johanna answered the following questions, among others:

• How do we model risk? Possible approaches?
• How do we measure risk? Possible approaches?
• How do we model value? Possible approaches?
• How do we measure value? Possible approaches?
• No matter how we try to have teams work vertically, we get teams saying that they need a cohesive team or microservice team as they need to build things, and the others will build on top of them. What do you think?
• How can the organization measure the benefit of agility?
• In some software development teams, it seems natural to have the design and mock-up ready before the development, before the sprint planning, and QA done after, sometimes in the next sprint, and it seems to work for them better than doing all in the same Sprint.
• Why do Architecture and Requirements work in dedicated time ranges ahead of increments? Does that hold for other business analysis activities like a risk analysis?
• Based on your experience, what must we do to be valuable agile coaches or consultants?
• Are there any cases where using the cost of delay does not work, or you would not use it?

📺 Watch the video now: Tackling Fake Agility w/ Johanna Rothman — 59. Hands-on Agile Meetup.

Meet Johanna Rothman

“People know me as the “Pragmatic Manager.” I offer frank advice—often with a little humor—for your tough problems. I help leaders and managers see and do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, you can decide how to adapt your product development, always focusing on the business outcomes you need.

My philosophy is that people want to do a good job. They don't always know what they are supposed to do, nor how to do it.”

Connect with Johanna Rothman

Johanna’s Blog

Johanna Rothman on LinkedIn

Johanna Rothman on Twitter (Her profile is still there, but I do not interact on that platform.)

Johanna Rothman on Mastodon

Johanna Rothman on Youtube

Johanna Rothman on Bsky

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Apr 10-11 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Apr 23-24 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 May 7 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 7 — Live Virtual Meetup: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 May 14-15 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 May 28-29 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Jun 25-26 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)

See all upcoming classes here.

If you have friends or colleagues who might be interested in this article as well, please forward this email—it would mean the world to me!

Have a great day!

Best,