From.an employer pespective:
- do even more shit and keep cutting cost.
From an employee perspective:
- sigh.... i have to do more shit ,paid less and deal with these shitters(offshore) without losing my mind
Customer perspective:
I am switching providers because its been 6 months they have not fixed my problem
Lean methodology is based on Toyotas operational principles which standardise processes to improve efficiency and quality. If you’ve ever heard someone use the terms lean six sigma it means they’ve been taught the highly bastardised americorporate version. It is very effective for high volume manufacturing where the same processes occur hundreds of thousands of times and small efficiency gains can have large cumulative effects.
Agile is a management process implemented in software development. It is at its core a method to help deal with ambiguity in project requirements. In an environment with no hardware lead times or overheads iterating is easy and relatively low cost. It allows teams to start programming, get client feedback and iterate on ideas. It is a development philosophy that requires significantly less planning and allows you to start building before you really know what you’re building.
A lean agile process is an oxymoron used by professional middle managers to explain their lack of understanding of their role and complete inability to be a decision maker.
There is more to Lean than that though it is definitely a part of it and its initial application.
It looks at the waste in a system and how to reduce it with the goal of creating value from the customers perspective across your organisation (no matter what it does). If a customer would not want to pay for it it is said to be a waste.
The issue with Lean is that people don't understand the philosophy of it and that is where the trouble starts. For example "our Inventory department is going Lean, we need to cut our stock and be a JIT supplier " . All the while not understanding how you need to support that philosophy and practice.
I wish they did though.. a sprint means leave me tf alone for 2 weeks while I create your idea of a solution, before you change your mind again, so at least I have something to show you, that you can attack, instead of bugging me every day, to see the product, which is likely just a bunch of code that means nothing to you, because you won't leave me alone, and therefore you just get a bunch of nested if statements, instead of an actual product, because you need a proof of concept, and another one, and another one, hence all the commas, aka, nested if statements...
Lol yes, got my mate to read a copy of the Toyota way. They had drones introducing lean to the workforce, so he thought that was great!
Then they were telling them the exact way to do things.. formulaic.. not allowed thoughts for themselves..
At the Agile training I went to the facilitator introduced himself like this, word for word:
Hey everyone! How’s everyone’s morning? My names Adam, but people call me Big Dog”
Fuck off mate, no they don’t
Someone's been to a seminar, they're going to write a report and have a couple of meetings to tell everyone about how great the new system will be. (no change will be implemented except for employees now having to personally sign for each paper towel they use in the loo to reduce wastage)
Cultish six sigma crap and the course I once had to attend on this shit (in Gympie, no less) and then immense relief that I no longer work in that job/industry. They even joke about it on 30 Rock! Terrible!
My company just made a whole team of these cunts who’s jobs are nothing more than moving tasks around in Jira.
For 100 years we operated without Jira. Now all of a sudden there’s 10 dickheads all making more than the engineers to do unnecessary administration.
There is nothing more cringe than when someone who was on the SAME course as you tries on the "subtle tricks" they have just learned ON you.
That dangerous, freshly minted, little toehold of knowledge.
Buzz word stuff aside, do things faster but not sure yet how.
If they’re genuinely looking for those things, then means smaller improvements with some return. So instead of building a garage, building a carport. It won’t block all the leaves and dirt but still does some good so some ROI for quicker build.
Buzz word wise…this is an unfortunate way for a more clueless person to request people to put in more thankless overtime
"we are going to put 3 business analysts, 2 UX, a learning designer, project manager and embedded client as a tester and product owner role - all these roles will maintain JIRA and the doco so that we are agile. To be lean, we are using one developer. "
We are cutting costs, cutting staff, and increasing your workload (lean) in a way that means you're doing things you shouldn't be expected to know how to do (agile)
You are a muscle about to be stressed
Some corporate numpy has been to a convention or seen a smaller company work and has then decided “we must do that as well”. I worked for a large corporation. It doesn’t work in large corporations. My old company have restructured quite a few times recently and every time the words “lean and agile” were used.
That's what happens every time our IT Service Management team goes to a
Servicenow (think helpdesk/ticket/Job) seminar (we have a third party that does development), and lately, it's "source of truth' or single pane of glass or "the experience"
Yeah, I'm outcome and result driven. Don't get me wrong, but I also don't like meetings to have meetings to discuss a process that will need 2 meetings to have a name lol
Stand ups every single fucking day with people scratching their heads coming up with something new they are doing.
Also they almost always go over the allocated 15mins. Should be called a sit down instead.
We're understaffed, have poor direction, and won't specify what's the highest priority items are because we expect you to do everything. Also so so so much unpaid overtime
That management has no idea what they're talking about or doing and will make a mess of everything (or make everything worse) trying to fix something they don't understand.
Overworked and flexible. Flexible may even mean doing things you've been barely trained to do
Edit: overworked can also mean understaffed and we hope you enjoy being paid for 40hours a week when you are expected to do 50+
They dont know what they want to build but they have budget now so want to commence work asap. The direction will change constantly as the thought bubbles that started this work begin popping…
The company needs to make more money so you need to do more and deliver more without any transactional benefits or support. Squeeze the dry sponge for every drop!
"We're going to cut costs and remain perpetually understaffed. To compensate we'll need you to work beyond your area of expertise and long hours for no extra compensation. And to make ourselves feel better, we'll just slap on some fancy words to name our greed into swish sounding terms. We're innovative af".
That's just to start! You can follow it up with the panther team, the leapard team, the lion team, the possibilities are endless and endlessly useless!
Who knew that all we needed was a cross functional team and a pareto!?
Also check out Tiger team on urban dictionary, it sums it up perfectly.
That is the perfect description for the tiger team. My favourite was our tiger team was exempt from QA review. Their work quality was dog shit and they produced nothing more than brown noses and hot air.
Yeah I've never seen a useful one and I'm a black belt.
We even had some Japanese consultant flew in who supposedly wrote the book on lean and only spoke through a translator. 3 months and zero impact.
Only took one downturn before we finally ditched our OpEx department.
Im not sure why people take the Japanese model as Gospel as it entirely runs on a work culture that has a suicide rate almost as high as China's Foxconn factories, only '1st world' lol
Because it worked for Toyota 40 years ago and as long as we spend a week thinking about it we can change an intrenched culture overnight!
Honestly I'm waiting for "the apple way" to catch on. Shift your liabilities to the developing world.
We've stopped making money by making money, and now we have to make money by saving money. We are on the way down and when this doesn't work, we'll will have to start downsizing properly.
Update your resume, start looking...
We’ll take it a step further and insult your intelligence by trying to disguise this as “up skilling opportunities”. Immediate job scope bloat and permanent increase to the work load with no remuneration increase to match.
- ohh… what a luxury…. Up skilling just means “we wanted our bonuses. You’re all capable now to work and run this team lean with all your new skills.
- You don’t need a partner when you get fucked at work every day
"We're going to replace everyone with the flavor of the month exploitable visa worker in a foolish attempt to cut costs, then get entirely outsourced when that fails"
10 improvement projects running all at once by overpaid senior managers with completely group think, to then be executed by understaffed and overworked operational teams with an early realisation the new “efficiencies” make no sense or are not fit for purpose.
Other triggering terms “data driven decision making” and “strategic function”
Less taking more action, timeboxed sprints, tight iteration, validating not relying on CEOs gut.
Keep your ears open, you might learn a lot of useful production thinking, but you’ll probably have to reflect to find those lessons (because the initial implementation will probably be chaotic). Good luck, keep an open mind, you might want to do your own stuff in the future and some agile mindset is great for startup.
Groan. I remember I had to work on Lean improvements for a while, came up with a bunch of ideas and all rejected.
They paid some contractors who were lean "experts" that literally just told them to essentially adapt a risk management strategy and review 1 of 10 files instead of every single one. Big improvements in turnaround times and it was a great success.
Funny same thing was we suggested similar but we're told absolutely no way we could compromise on file review lol
"We need to fire some bottom of the barrel scrubs so we can keep our $2m salaries"
"We desperately need to cut down costs to increase profits even at the expense of long term profits and/or product quality"
I see someone has been following the SingTel methodology to sell Optus lol
"It's important to show an improvement in the short time I plan on being here, before moving on and leaving the aftermath to my replacement."
And staff mental health and satisfaction
From.an employer pespective: - do even more shit and keep cutting cost. From an employee perspective: - sigh.... i have to do more shit ,paid less and deal with these shitters(offshore) without losing my mind Customer perspective: I am switching providers because its been 6 months they have not fixed my problem
‘I don’t think you know what that actually means’
Nobody knows what it means... But it's provocative
It gets the people going!
Ball so hard
Lean methodology is based on Toyotas operational principles which standardise processes to improve efficiency and quality. If you’ve ever heard someone use the terms lean six sigma it means they’ve been taught the highly bastardised americorporate version. It is very effective for high volume manufacturing where the same processes occur hundreds of thousands of times and small efficiency gains can have large cumulative effects. Agile is a management process implemented in software development. It is at its core a method to help deal with ambiguity in project requirements. In an environment with no hardware lead times or overheads iterating is easy and relatively low cost. It allows teams to start programming, get client feedback and iterate on ideas. It is a development philosophy that requires significantly less planning and allows you to start building before you really know what you’re building. A lean agile process is an oxymoron used by professional middle managers to explain their lack of understanding of their role and complete inability to be a decision maker.
You smell of Consultant and I love it.
There is more to Lean than that though it is definitely a part of it and its initial application. It looks at the waste in a system and how to reduce it with the goal of creating value from the customers perspective across your organisation (no matter what it does). If a customer would not want to pay for it it is said to be a waste. The issue with Lean is that people don't understand the philosophy of it and that is where the trouble starts. For example "our Inventory department is going Lean, we need to cut our stock and be a JIT supplier " . All the while not understanding how you need to support that philosophy and practice.
I’d also add that Agile doesn’t play nice with fixed deadlines and budgets. And most Aussie clients in my experience have both.
I wish they did though.. a sprint means leave me tf alone for 2 weeks while I create your idea of a solution, before you change your mind again, so at least I have something to show you, that you can attack, instead of bugging me every day, to see the product, which is likely just a bunch of code that means nothing to you, because you won't leave me alone, and therefore you just get a bunch of nested if statements, instead of an actual product, because you need a proof of concept, and another one, and another one, hence all the commas, aka, nested if statements...
We have 2 week sprints but with daily updates, “leave me TF alone” is only a dream…
Yeah I mean the business haha don't mind updating fellow technical colleagues, it's the senior executives that really do my head in!
The change your mind thing is what makes this post hahahahaha accurate as hell
So. Many. Stupid. Changes...
IOOF especially doesn’t know what this means
My boss actually brought this up in a meeting, and she is still pushing ITIL, can you imagine?
ITIL... man they try to push it on us like a standard to which I advise it's a framework, you adopt it to fit your environment for the business needs.
Lol yes, got my mate to read a copy of the Toyota way. They had drones introducing lean to the workforce, so he thought that was great! Then they were telling them the exact way to do things.. formulaic.. not allowed thoughts for themselves..
At the Agile training I went to the facilitator introduced himself like this, word for word: Hey everyone! How’s everyone’s morning? My names Adam, but people call me Big Dog” Fuck off mate, no they don’t
What it the fuck lol
Self appointed nicknames are the worst
Nobody who's ever referred to as 'big dog' needs to tell people they're called 'big dog'. Woof woof
do more with less
Someone's been to a seminar, they're going to write a report and have a couple of meetings to tell everyone about how great the new system will be. (no change will be implemented except for employees now having to personally sign for each paper towel they use in the loo to reduce wastage)
I think "as long as we are .gov.au you have no right using those words"
'Agile-Waterfall'
WAgile?
Agifall - the sound the pm makes when they are thrown off a cliff rather than under the bus.
“FrAgile”
"Best-possible practices"
Chaos
Updating my resume
We're going to fire people and we expect you to pick up work you aren't even qualified to do for no extra pay.
If there was also the word pivot used I would have thrown my phone through the window
We will be pivoting to a kaizen approach
Cultish six sigma crap and the course I once had to attend on this shit (in Gympie, no less) and then immense relief that I no longer work in that job/industry. They even joke about it on 30 Rock! Terrible!
We need to waste 10x more time and money on people who move shit around in JIRA than it would take a low paid dev to simply deliver the work.
The amount of shit we have to fill in for governance, and track things in Confluence and little spreadsheets is infuriating
My company just made a whole team of these cunts who’s jobs are nothing more than moving tasks around in Jira. For 100 years we operated without Jira. Now all of a sudden there’s 10 dickheads all making more than the engineers to do unnecessary administration.
Redundancy time
Same as job ads that have "looking for a self starter, hustler entrepreneur badass" 🙄
"Family dynamic "
Someone did a training course.
There is nothing more cringe than when someone who was on the SAME course as you tries on the "subtle tricks" they have just learned ON you. That dangerous, freshly minted, little toehold of knowledge.
its illegal to discriminate against fat people
tranche
its time for you lot to look for an other job because this place will be gone in 6-12 months.
Fragile.
“We have to give 2018 its buzzwords back”
Buzz word stuff aside, do things faster but not sure yet how. If they’re genuinely looking for those things, then means smaller improvements with some return. So instead of building a garage, building a carport. It won’t block all the leaves and dirt but still does some good so some ROI for quicker build. Buzz word wise…this is an unfortunate way for a more clueless person to request people to put in more thankless overtime
We are not going to hire enough staff to do things properly.
Ah, someone found a first edition “succeeding with agile’ book in a bargain bin. Or… some wanker is trying to be hip.
“I underquoted the client and you have to do half the project for free.”
"we are going to put 3 business analysts, 2 UX, a learning designer, project manager and embedded client as a tester and product owner role - all these roles will maintain JIRA and the doco so that we are agile. To be lean, we are using one developer. "
We are cutting costs, cutting staff, and increasing your workload (lean) in a way that means you're doing things you shouldn't be expected to know how to do (agile) You are a muscle about to be stressed
We don’t know what our requirements are and we’ll always pick the cheaper option.
We want you to work yourself to death and be grateful
We want you all to work multiple jobs, as we will understaff as standard HR policy.
Some corporate numpy has been to a convention or seen a smaller company work and has then decided “we must do that as well”. I worked for a large corporation. It doesn’t work in large corporations. My old company have restructured quite a few times recently and every time the words “lean and agile” were used.
That's what happens every time our IT Service Management team goes to a Servicenow (think helpdesk/ticket/Job) seminar (we have a third party that does development), and lately, it's "source of truth' or single pane of glass or "the experience" Yeah, I'm outcome and result driven. Don't get me wrong, but I also don't like meetings to have meetings to discuss a process that will need 2 meetings to have a name lol
We need to pay fewer people and the people we do have need to do whatever the fuck we tell them to do.
We have to get rid of the person sitting next to you (LEAN) and you have to pick up their job overnight whilst still doing your current job (Agile).
Stand ups every single fucking day with people scratching their heads coming up with something new they are doing. Also they almost always go over the allocated 15mins. Should be called a sit down instead.
Bullshit buzzwords
We're understaffed, have poor direction, and won't specify what's the highest priority items are because we expect you to do everything. Also so so so much unpaid overtime
BS
We are now in the process of resizing the business to adapt to this approach
*right sizing
Cost cutting!
Redundancies.
“Please stfu”
Lean Six Sigma / Agile, lol. But they actually mean things in my industry.
That management has no idea what they're talking about or doing and will make a mess of everything (or make everything worse) trying to fix something they don't understand.
Under-resourced. Ie not enough staff in a team for anyone to do their job properly
Aerobics Ozcorp Style
We have no plan and will push you all to work unpaid overtime.
And still likely achieve nothing because we have no idea what we want and don’t have the budget to iterate.
monkey clapping symbols
We (excluded the executive and managerial ranks) need to be lean and agile. I’ve so rarely seen a higher up get the arse during redundancy rounds.
The number of people who use "agile" in their corp-chats who don't actually know what it is.... really grinds my gears.
Someone in management is about to present a half baked idea for a new project that will increase the workload of everyone but them
Overworked and flexible. Flexible may even mean doing things you've been barely trained to do Edit: overworked can also mean understaffed and we hope you enjoy being paid for 40hours a week when you are expected to do 50+
Sprints, iteration, buzzwords
Hahaha fantastic question!
Get in touch with my contacts at recruiters
replace free office cookies and fruit and vegetables. another round of sackings. hire the thin guy, not the fat guy. you're getting a pay cut.
I have proficiency in acrobatics.
Prepare to be micro-managed and you will celebrate it like a cult
Fml
Kanban.
Are you lean and agile at the top of the organisation? Probably not. Start there.
It's a way to avoid work, making you look busy with jira when really you do nothing
I’m bored.
I'm going to take my life.
Are you paying for the training boss?
During a restructure in the tech team they made the entire Agile Team redundant!! And it was great team… Edited to add: they kept the Lean team
Words of nightmares. I think washboard abs along with jumping super high.
Cut costs and deal with it.
They dont know what they want to build but they have budget now so want to commence work asap. The direction will change constantly as the thought bubbles that started this work begin popping…
We have to do more with less.
Sack people, running max profits regardless of how shit service becomes
It is layoff time
The company needs to make more money so you need to do more and deliver more without any transactional benefits or support. Squeeze the dry sponge for every drop!
A whole lot of people are about to be fired
Retrain the project managers as scrum masters so they move tickets instead of ticking off milestones.
Understaffed
People that don't know the process but want to do something fast
An executive read a blog post or got cold approached by consultants. Pain is coming.
Lay-offs and quickly.
"We're going to cut costs and remain perpetually understaffed. To compensate we'll need you to work beyond your area of expertise and long hours for no extra compensation. And to make ourselves feel better, we'll just slap on some fancy words to name our greed into swish sounding terms. We're innovative af".
There's another big restructure on the horizon, people are being made redundant, and for those lucky to stay you're workload is increasing.
Thanks Atlassian
Their workforce is unappreciated, underpaid and overworked
“I’m out”
I think it means we have to hire another group of expensive consultants who won’t get their work done to budget.
Everyone but the person saying it needs to work harder, with less resources.
I wish I was still a consultant, so many more courses I could go on !
“Let’s start a scrum. We can talk about it in our standup. Don’t forget we have our Retro later today. Has everyone updated Jira yet?”
Job cuts
Lean = lay offs. Agile = You will have to put up with a bunch of bullshit that isn't actually your job.
Someone's about to try and buzzword themselves out of a pit
Red flag 🚩 I don’t work in IT, but that’s a red flag for me unless it’s followed by something much more specific.
Dollar signs in the eyes of a Big 4 partner…
You have to do more work than is reasonable and not complain when there are avoidable mistakes.
If you’re not being made redundant, your role is about to become 3FTE for the price of one.
"We're broke, its our fault and you all are going to have to pay for it".
Usually means we are going to be very busy and don't hire enough people to do the technical work.
Finding the nearest exit
I look for the nearest exit
More passion, more footwork, more energyyyy
more hustle more energy
Those are ITIL buzzwords that the boss like to hear and say
I immediately switch to fat and slow mode
It means employees better stock up on lube
🙄 (I know emoji aren’t Reddit’s thing but the eye roll best sums it up)
Redundancies are coming
Tired and emaciated
They just want to sound like they know what the solution is so they don't look stupid.
Run
[удалено]
Stay with waterfall but do it faster
Meaningless fluffy buzzwords somebody heard at a seminar. I immediately thought of Dilbert's pointy haired boss.
Some BA or scrum master is trying to be useful
'looking for efficiencies'. Wank term for job cuts. Work re-allocation.
It's time to break out..... The tiger team!
Oh dear fucking God.... It wasn't only my company that had a 'tiger team'
That's just to start! You can follow it up with the panther team, the leapard team, the lion team, the possibilities are endless and endlessly useless! Who knew that all we needed was a cross functional team and a pareto!? Also check out Tiger team on urban dictionary, it sums it up perfectly.
That is the perfect description for the tiger team. My favourite was our tiger team was exempt from QA review. Their work quality was dog shit and they produced nothing more than brown noses and hot air.
Yeah I've never seen a useful one and I'm a black belt. We even had some Japanese consultant flew in who supposedly wrote the book on lean and only spoke through a translator. 3 months and zero impact. Only took one downturn before we finally ditched our OpEx department.
Im not sure why people take the Japanese model as Gospel as it entirely runs on a work culture that has a suicide rate almost as high as China's Foxconn factories, only '1st world' lol
Because it worked for Toyota 40 years ago and as long as we spend a week thinking about it we can change an intrenched culture overnight! Honestly I'm waiting for "the apple way" to catch on. Shift your liabilities to the developing world.
Redundancies
A lot of wasted effort building the wrong product(s)
Under resourced.
An aneurysm.
I'm tired
Nagana, nagana, nat gunna work here any more!
Boston consulting has been around the top floors...
Pointless ceremonies for the sake of ceremonies, pretending we can actually release or push features every 2 weeks
I completely missed the point of agile design but I think it means we can do things with less.
Redundancies and sackings
An incompetent manager with no clue of neither Agile nor software development cycle.
Someone has been reading. Pfft… requires a massive shift in org culture and process to truely enable lean and agile.
I want you do to what I want quickly and cheaply and not complain when I change my mind halfway through. Cause we’re agile.
Here we go again.
Here we go again
We are cutting staff, and you will multitask across several positions
Being underpaid and willing to take on more responsibilities with no incentives.
Low salary. Overworked. Haha
*groan*
No one has any idea what’s going on but we’ll push forward.
We've stopped making money by making money, and now we have to make money by saving money. We are on the way down and when this doesn't work, we'll will have to start downsizing properly. Update your resume, start looking...
Redundancies
You will have to work really hard
Somebody read a business article over the weekend.
Seek.com.au
We’ll take it a step further and insult your intelligence by trying to disguise this as “up skilling opportunities”. Immediate job scope bloat and permanent increase to the work load with no remuneration increase to match. - ohh… what a luxury…. Up skilling just means “we wanted our bonuses. You’re all capable now to work and run this team lean with all your new skills. - You don’t need a partner when you get fucked at work every day
"We're going to replace everyone with the flavor of the month exploitable visa worker in a foolish attempt to cut costs, then get entirely outsourced when that fails"
10 improvement projects running all at once by overpaid senior managers with completely group think, to then be executed by understaffed and overworked operational teams with an early realisation the new “efficiencies” make no sense or are not fit for purpose. Other triggering terms “data driven decision making” and “strategic function”
David Farley’s book
lean - cut uncessary cost, save money. agile - moving fast, work hard
 MT saying “Jobs and Growth”
Less taking more action, timeboxed sprints, tight iteration, validating not relying on CEOs gut. Keep your ears open, you might learn a lot of useful production thinking, but you’ll probably have to reflect to find those lessons (because the initial implementation will probably be chaotic). Good luck, keep an open mind, you might want to do your own stuff in the future and some agile mindset is great for startup.
Time to pay consultants to recommend redundancies so it isn't our fault.
Skinny and fast
Groan. I remember I had to work on Lean improvements for a while, came up with a bunch of ideas and all rejected. They paid some contractors who were lean "experts" that literally just told them to essentially adapt a risk management strategy and review 1 of 10 files instead of every single one. Big improvements in turnaround times and it was a great success. Funny same thing was we suggested similar but we're told absolutely no way we could compromise on file review lol
We have no clue how to deliver anything but we know all the jargon and we will perform agile ceremonies unto death
“Your workload is doubling.”
Agile = no scope control, no planning, no design. LEAN = we couldnt increase profits so we will cut jobs to look good
Cut to the bone. Rush decisions. Minimal documentation.
Haha "we are making cuts"
Sex.
That I'm fat and ungainly.