It's all gone very Lord of the Flies

We're at the end of our secnod month of the Agile conversion at work and things are ... rough. Many of the senior non-development people that work here are talking about leaving in private discussions. Excluding coding, the work to be done seems excessively trivial. Too many people feel like the skills and specialisms they've honed are no longer getting used, and instead they're frittering away their time on projects that are small in scope mentally as well as physically (if that makes sense). The conclusion is that if the economy was better we'd have already seen people leaving, but they're hanging on - though the resumes are already going out. Even the person who sits next to me and is consistently chipper and "let's look on the bright side of things" is saying that her work life on a daily basis is rotten.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere of "everyone can do any task" has led to an environment I liken to Lord of the Flies - the savages have painted their cheeks and declared themselves to be Product Managers (or UI developers, or Business Analysts) because they went to training where they were Told They Could and no one is stepping in to stop them. So in Sprint Planning meetings I have to listen to people spend two hours arguing over what "done" is because they are all now Agile experts, and in another team all seven people are having to work out what the requirements are for a project because They Are Empowered Now and no one bothered to do the research beforehand (not even enough to do an estimate) because to plan what you're doing before a sprint start is Crypto-Waterfall Apologism, don't you know. Too many people are running out of work to do long before their sprints are over (again with the lack of planning), but we're stuck with overly-long sprints created by executive fiat and fixed resources "because in training they said sharing people is a risk."

I am really hoping that a lot of these things will get ironed out in the next month but being stuck in the middle of things makes it very difficult to have a good attitude about it. I do feel like for a lot of senior specialists (like myself) Agile is not really offering the kind of career growth and challenges that I want, and I fear that between the abyssmal morale and the change in what's required of us, we will be having a substantial amount of staff turnover.

Lesson here: two days of training is not enough (everyone got the same training, from the developers to the scrum masters to the UI developers and QA) and a lot more planning should have been done before we started this process so that we could have hit the ground running and got a lot more out of our first sprints, rather than burning so many people out at the very beginning. I would have especially looked at something really intensive for the scrummasters so they knew how to get maximum use out of their teams at the very start, and they could have percolated expectations (and work) back down to their groups so that they knew what to do at the start rather than flailing around like we have been.