Agile Development

Antipattern: Adrenaline Junkie

Antipattern: Adrenaline Junkie

Understanding Project Pressure and Tension

I constantly wonder why situations arise where pressure and tension are generated in projects. One reason is that most projects are simply complex—you have to coordinate several, sometimes dozens of people, anticipate and plan in advance what will happen, and determine what resources will be needed. As a species, we’re not very good at detailed long-term planning (see: David Rock – Your Brain at Work).

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Why Agile Fails

Introduction

Implementing a methodology from the Agile family is not at all easy. The problem usually lies in management, who upon superficially understanding what it’s all about, perceive the new method as a promise that from now on, everything will magically work better. It doesn’t matter if we have subpar team members and adhere to the principle that “any specialist can be replaced by a finite number of students.” It doesn’t matter if there’s complete disregard for knowledge management and skill development in the team because there’s never time for that. It doesn’t matter if people working on projects are shuffled between projects—after all, it’s about interdisciplinarity, and everyone should know everything.

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