Big 4 scrum consultant giving bad advice - correct or let fail?

Question

An agile coach was called to promote agile in a big bank. In one of his teams, half of the team is external consultants who have been there for 3-4 years. They currently implement Sales Force.

In the words of the Team's Certified Scrum Master, their Software Development Lifecyle is:

1. Do a high level analysis for about 1.5 months In this phase everyone is creating user stories, since the Product Owner (PO) is too busy to write all of the user stories coming from all the workshops that are currently happening to lock down the system's specs. They claimed that this 1.5 month of discovery and design is necessary, since there is massive inter-connection amongst the pieces in Sales Force, and that they have to decide upfront what they can implement and what not (based on external dependencies).
2. Create a Backlog with all the user stories that will be prioritized during the sprints by the PO, and run sprint planning sessions. Deliver in an "sprint" - iterative fashion for 3 months
3. Last 3 months, back end / integration testing with the rest of the existing systems.

The consultant even mentioned that comprehensive documentation is needed in case something goes wrong, and they need to refer back to who's fault is it, so that the consultancy is in the clear.

They currently do stand ups (?) to report what they did yesterday, and what they will do today, but no planning meeting or retrospective, as they are in the "designing phase".

The agile coach raised this with a couple of other managers and they said in an eye rolling fashion "yeah, these (consultancy name here) do it their own way and have their own agenda."

The PO is clearly biased to follow the consultant's approach, since they have been working together for a while, and she has been a program manager for a while, and then converted to a PO.

Have you had experience similarly with external consultants who claim to have figured it out, but have got it all wrong, but are strongly positioned within a company?

Should the agile coach enforce a practice and claim that everything they do is agile, or should he let them fail and feel the pain before he intervenes?

Answer 1

I have been in a similar situation (in a retail bank), with consultants offering what they call 'enterprise Agile'. The result was waterfall and highly problematic.

The consultancies are typically very good at lobbying support (especially with the executive). So it can be a challenge to call them out.

I would recommend to your Agile coach that they do the following:

• First agree on what metrics you are trying to improve with Agile (e.g. time to market)
• Suggest running some projects/teams using a genuine Agile approach and some using the approach suggested by the consultants
• Time box the evaluation
• At the end of the time box, see which approach has had the most positive impact on the metrics you are trying to improve

Answer 2

There is nothing agile about the consultant's approach and certainly not use of the Scrum framework. That is waterfall with some modern software development terms being misused.

Allowing an internal team to learn through controlled experimentation is a good mentality; permitting a consultant to waste money for any length of time is ludicrous.

Answer 3

Try to identify the biggest pain point and articulate the Agile practices that will mitigate that

Looks like you are convinced that the existing approach will certainly fail:

...or should he let them fail and feel the pain before he intervenes?

However, you didn't say which aspect of their current practice you think is likely to cause problems, other than a general:

...no planning meeting or retrospective

You seem to have higher Management support, because they hired you and are paying for your services. However, your first attempt should be to try to articulate to the team what is the main weakness in their current process and how Scrum/Agile will overcome that.

For example, waiting till the last stage of the project to do back end / integration testing you might identify as a big risk.

Talk to the PO and also the consultants. At a minimum, you may be able to convince the PO. Even then if you run into resistance to change, then you can talk to senior Management and try to enforce the "everything should be agile" mandate.