A struggle within MIT’s IT department over its future
&gt;Another former employee said that he decided to leave IS&amp;T when he realized “the  organization would never truly be able to adopt agile practices such as Scrum.”<p>I am curious if anyone in software&#x2F;IT has successfully lobbied management for a &quot;rollback&quot; of agile development methodology?<p>Anecdote: Last year, I was put on as a tech lead for a project; my boss asked me to use Agile to track and manage the project. I tracked the project&#x27;s tasks as JIRA tickets, but I did not do morning standup&#x27;s because I did not think I was going to get buy-in from the rest of my team (my workplace has a 2 day work-from-home policy, common hatred on team for meetings, so it&#x27;s impossible to have everyone meet in person every weekday consistently due to flex-time).<p>I did not do Sprint planning meeting and ticket estimation (Agile poker cards) because people on my team loved to argue over minutiae&#x27;s and I strongly suspected half of the team didn&#x27;t know the details of what the other half is working on; So instead, we had a weekly &quot;flowchart&quot; meeting on a large whiteboard where we brainstormed and added more details to our software project (a big data pipeline lends itself to a flowchart); I found it to be a better visualization of the project than a post-it covered poster.<p>Fortunately for me, I had a much senior technical person in my org also lobby also against Agile. The crux of the argument was Agile wasn&#x27;t well suited for our team; the sprint model of Agile easily lends itself to arbitrary deadlines and building for the &quot;demo&quot; of the story&#x2F;epic of that sprint and build-up of tech-debt (e.g., build a demo for one sprint, spent next 3 sprints fixing bugs for the features of the first sprint).<p>In the end, management relented and we ended our Agile experiment. Project tracking is done in Google Doc&#x27;s with milestones instead. I am curious to hear if there are pushbacks in other places against Agile since it is now the de-facto &quot;industry best-practice&quot; (which means consulting should soon come up with newer set of workshops&#x2F;manifesto&#x27;s for a &quot;new best-practice).