Allen Holub made an interesting quote during the course of a talk that struck a good chord.

Scrum is basically a wrapper put around Extreme programming in order to make it more palatable for management.

One of the initial discussions I had with our QA lead a few months back was to put in a discipline of all stakeholders discussing pre-sprint.

A la a CEO pitching their making-the-world-a-better-place product and VCs taking their time to get back with feasiblilty and PMF questions, product owners pitch and technical stakeholders assess and get back. He said, well, that’s XP there. As a rose by any other name person, as long as it pushes things ahead.

What in general is looked down by young entities or even insinuates them about institutions is the discipline of process. Granted, there’s ample and more where it ends up in analysis paralysis.

Getting back, what if management is driven by KPIs and OKRs rather than the philosophical definition of what an Objective is and how a result maps back looking ahead into the future?

As a wise man once never said, you can engineer a solution to almost anything, but as long as you have humans who don’t ask the fundamental questions, you are throwing your time down the drain.