As I wrote this as a response to many of the agile complaints here, I thought this might be a good place for discussion.

I want to make clear that I don't think agile is perfect, but I find the major problem with most critiques is that they are unwilling to extend into alternatives past ad-hoc methodologies.

So, I’m a first-level manager and we basically run an ad-hoc for our team that looks like a blend of spiral and milestones.

For me, the problems arise when methodologies intended for large-scale are applied at a small scale.

What’s a methodology for anyways? To help communicate and to reason-at-scale. If you can’t communicate or reason with a single team, process isn’t going to help. But once you have 200+, then you need process!

And my larger organization does have process, it looks waterfallish repeated every six months. I just don’t apply it to my team.

Spiral goes deeper once you get in. I got into a rabbit hole reading through some of the best practices and it ran into the same stakeholder management that is common.

It’s a fun historical count and I might write up some of the learnings later on.