My DH is on a work Zoom, and OMG the 'jargon'

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

Scrum teams
Scrum master
Scrum of scrums
Cadence
Enterprise level agile
Continuous integration pipeline
We can drill into that later
Operate at scale
I'll drive on and we can circle back
Acceptance test driven development
Decomposition of requirements
Just to land that point on the ground
Chain of tools

That's just the last three minutes. Safe to say I have no clue what's going on there.

I say business change team. We have Accenture in at the moment and it's all talks of sprints and squads.

Do he have skin in the game?

What happened to Plain English? I liked it when the trend was to move away from inaccessible jargon.

I’ve just looked up the wrike link that @DrDreReturns posted.

I have used Kanban so actually knowing what the real thing is, it all seems reasonable enough - it’s just a tool for organising work so that teams can see what has been done/still needs to be done.

I think it’s the drama around these things and the way they are talked about that bemuses me - as OP says.

Do people realise what they are saying and know that the real one/expression would have so much more impact?

Real words/expression, sorry

I also think it’s designed to fit and work for a very specific type of person - male, short attention/impatient, needs to see clear end result, no abstract thinking, ‘lean’= cut to the bone = too thin therefore moves quickly but not sustainable.

It reminds me off offices I have worked in that are designed for a high turnover of staff/companies. Nothing personal allowed on desks, no sense of individual character, etc or anything at all organic rather sterile and impersonal and designed so that you can move people/businesses in/out as quick as possible.

Functional yes, but at a cost that doesn’t sit well with quality, consistency, true continuity.

I think it’s like comparing rugby with cricket. One is a game of skill, tactics, strategy, patience, deliberation and mental agility and endurance.

The other, isn’t.

And the name ‘agile’ is a total bloody misnomer especially if you work in sprints. I find it completely rigid and inflexible - case in point is that our agile “coach” said people should organise their holidays around end of sprint/sprint planning days, call into the office on one of those days even if you’re in the doctors waiting room etc. Bollocks to that unless you want to make my pay grade commensurate with it.

@serenada - my team are a mixed (software, firmware, hardware) group, so total Agile doesn't work as some things need to be done first, and we are also in a highly regulated environment, so there are some other issues to contend with. So we came up with a structure that once the project was scoped, and an end date set, we divide up the feature set/ requirements into buckets so that all the tasks related to things that affect each other are in the same bucket (so the same area doesn't get repeatedly broken), but also that those things that are absolute must dos are completely done before the nice to haves are started - but it lets the teams retain some autonomy on what they fancy doing next out of the bucket or choosing something they can complete and hand over for unit testing before their holiday. Within this structure, we do have a fairly Agile approach.
It doesn't have a fancy name, but its been working well for the last couple of years combined with a strict cake based reward system

@CMOTDibbler

Yes, I can see that a cake based reward system would produce good results.

Alongside a cappachuchu (see Bob Mortimer video above).

I’m a scrum master. I’m sure agile employs stupid terminology just to make people pay for courses to understand what it’s supposed to mean. Eg, ‘ceremonies’ = regular meetings. “stories”= jobs to do.

Yes, I magine that's exactly why they do it. Wow - talk about emperor's new clothes!

'Ceemonies' sounds a bit like the Handmaid's Tale!

“stories”= jobs to do

In fairness, the standardised user story and bug report formats are really useful when doing requirements analysis.

Is he a product manager of some sort. All of the Scrum references etc. are to do will product workflow.

Forgot to ask why is it that their voices go up 20 decibels when they’re on a conference call? Do they think it makes them sound more authoritative and convincing?! All the nonsense jargon and acronyms annoy the hell out of me too!

Haxxor - I think the point is that there is nothing unique to agile which can achieve that - nothing that common sense in plain English couldn’t also accomplish.

They are specific techniques that have a name.

Lots of disciplines are like this.

Also it’s not limited to any specific industry, it’s a framework.

I think we had an MD. The Directors, then chief, deputy chief, managers, and project managers for specials...
We had meetings.
And progress meetings for projects, oh and to do lists.

For you ‘agile’ types, I give you the worlds biggest jargon roadmap.

Looks impenetrable to me

Please tell me there are workplaces where you can, you know, just speak English. Normally, with the correct terminology

Can you tell me when you find any?

Thanks Helspopje I'll definitely read through that diagram, just not at the moment as I've got some drying paint that needs watching.

I'm a programmer and have had to put up with this shit for 12+ years.
My absolute fave is middle management congratulating themselves on using Agile but having fixed release dates before anything has been defined/planned

I'm in financial services and although there are a few acronyms around we rarely talk that level of bollocks on a routine Teams call.

I do, however, look after a huge American corporate client, and their jargon and terminology has taken me months to get to grips with. A call with 20 of their sales staff is utterly exhausting, they abbreviate and come up with terms for everything.

I had a similar issue to UggMum this week, I was just about to start a one to one mentoring session with a trainee on Teams when my stomach gave the most enormous surge, like a washing machine draining. I've been on a meal replacement diet and it does extraordinary things to one's bowels.

I had 60 seconds to log in to the meeting, so I had my excuses lined up, bathroom door open a short dash away and loo paper stocked. I was sweating at the thought of failing to disconnect when the moment came, but somehow my innards caught up with themselves as I was waffling on about UK regulators and the horror passed. Not literally, thank goodness.

Anyway, I'm off to change my name to Platitudinous.

My favourite one ever was a manager who said "I don't want to be the condom on the prick of progress".

😂

Risk management? Continuous improvement?

Bag of wank?

I’m a scrum master. I’m sure agile employs stupid terminology just to make people pay for courses to understand what it’s supposed to mean. Eg, ‘ceremonies’ = regular meetings. “stories”= jobs to do.

^

Like Slimming World, really. Speed food? Veg.