Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

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> Organizations are afraid of individuals deciding things, and individuals are eager to push their decisions onto a "process" or "policy"

But! but we're in IT and the Agile Manifesto is the exact reaction to that! We have a living proof that "another way" is possible. Hire champions and trust them on the task, it makes them more enterprising and crafters and makes them deliver systematic higher quality. Remember how IBM's IT used to be: Pathetic chain of specification-driven documents that "decision-makers" couldn't possibly read.

Let's just say for the moment that the rest of the industries haven't found an "Agile metgodology" that befits them. Let's hope it's just a matter of time before government-sized organizations have an epiphany about how to apply Agile to death-risking processes.

Looking at this issue more broadly, I definitely agree that non-IT industries need to take into account Agile methodology to improve their results.

I've been looking for the reason why IT has come up with Agile before anyone else (I don't consider Lean Industrial Management as Agile whatsoever) and I simply think it's because the first industry with so much information in it (it's in the title even...).

Now that other industries have to orchestrate huge processes with huge amounts of information, I hope they'll take into account what IT brought up to solve this issue instead of taking the "IBM route" further (more policies, more guidelines, more bureaucracy).

> Looking at this issue more broadly, I definitely agree that non-IT industries need to take into account Agile methodology to improve their results.

Non-IT industries are often ahead of the “Agile” movement in IT, having adopted Lean methodology and related approaches that actually applying engineering approaches to solve the problem identified, but not actionably addressed, in the Agile Manifesto.

Most so-called Agile methodologies (the exceptions mostly being adaptations from Lean methodologies, either in other industries or from the Lean Software Development movement) fail to do this, and Agile has largely become exactly the kind of cargo cult, situation-blind consultant-driven, value-blind nightmare that the Agile Manifesto was a response against.

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