
Capability Immaturity Model - dredmorbius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Immaturity_Model
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msluyter
Level -1 reminds me some companies I've known, except s/CMM/scrum/g, which
leads me to a theory[1] about scrum that's formed in my mind that I haven't
heard articulated elsewhere -- I'd be curious to hear reactions:

If you're an intrinsically motivated software professional, you're likely
motivated by a number of different factors: creating a great product, love of
solving problems, writing elegant code, the fun of building new things, making
users happy, etc... (exact levels those matter vary by person.) You're
probably _not_ intrinsically motivated by things like hitting sprint goals,
achieving a certain velocity, meeting OKRs, etc... (Did you enroll in CS
classes thinking "I'm so looking forward to hitting sprint targets!"?) Thus,
all of these tend to amount to various forms of extrinsic motivation.

A problem with scrum, IMHO, is that it places these extrinsic factors front
and center. Yes, the other things may still matter, but the stuff you focus on
and _talk_ about week after week are the various scrum related ephemera. (One
may include OKRs, which you may not discuss as often but which may represent
another extrinsic factor looming in the background.)

There's some evidence to suggest that extrinsic motivation may dampen one's
intrinsic motivation, and so a pet theory of mine is that, to the extent scrum
does that, it has a certain deflationary effect on the overall morale of an
engineering organization. It might be subtle, depending on the particular org
and how scrum is implemented[2]. I didn't even notice it until I went to a
place that didn't use scrum.

[1] I'm not strongly committed to this idea. It's just something rolling
around my brain.

[2] Obviously, some orgs are better than others. I'm open to the idea that the
above is more a reflection of "scrum done badly" than scrum itself.

~~~
dreamcompiler
A friend who is an agile advocate calls this "weaponized agile." The goal is
not to produce a product, but to be able to boast "we're doing agile."

~~~
kevstev
A lot of this happens when people lose sight of the goals of doing agile, and
instead become focused (you might even say obsessed) with just the rituals
involved- IE the daily standup, the burndown chart, etc.

These also tend to be the organizations in my experience where things tend to
devolve quickly- standups take an hour, hard decisions aren't made in
grooming, managers will go over the previous day's major fire and then beat up
people over the fact that the burndown chart hasn't moved...

They get to put down on their resume that they are doing the trendy thing
though...

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smarks
I thought this was a silly joke at first, but it's actually sort-of an attempt
to capture actual organizational anti-patterns. I mean at some level assigning
an "immaturity level" is silly. However, characterizing various pathologies of
bad organizations is helpful.

I think I've actually worked in organizations that were at level -3. Sometimes
this was a reasonable goal taken to an absurd extreme. For example, a
reasonable Software Quality Engineering organization's goal would be to find
as many bugs as possible in the software product, or in short, to try to
"break" the product. Taken to an extreme, the ability of an SQE organization
to exaggerate any concern about quality to such an extent that it manages to
stop the shipment of the product because of quality concerns, can be construed
as a success for that SQE organization. In the case I'm thinking of, the SQE
org was basically obstructionist, because they got rewarded for that. It was
amazing that we managed ever to ship anything.

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lidHanteyk
I've experienced level 0 and level -1 organizations. This is an only-serious
approach to trying to understand dysfunction, and I like it quite a bit.

Managers, product owners, and marketers need to understand how computers work.
There's no alternative anymore; folks are savvy enough that snake-oil products
with questionable business value are not having the market penetration that
they used to. The days of being able to simply mail a CD to folks are long
past.

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ldargin
That's a good Monday morning chuckle.

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dreamcompiler
I've worked at both level -1 and level -3 organizations. -3 is usually doomed
because the organization is actively self-sabotaging and the money is going to
run out quickly unless management identifies the toxic actors and gets rid of
them. And that rarely seems to happen.

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badlogin78
at work we use Slack

