Derisking a project 1 year out

"No deviations will be approved from this year's Agile product roadmap!"

This year’s? We can’t even make it through this sprint’s roadmap without a deviation.

Bonus points if it’s C-suite crashing the sprint.

We work in sprints but plan on roadmaps based on quarters one year into the future. So basically we just combine the worst of both worlds.

"Oh we have bugs from feature XY from last sprint? Never mind we need to follow the roadmap, we can fix it next quarter"

Fuck, I hate it so much

Who the hell came up with that? 😂 I'm sorry, but that's hilarious.

Anti Commercial-AI license
- Not sure about GP, but that's basically what we did under "SAFe" (Scaled Agile Framework). PI planning means taking most of a sprint to plan everything for the next quarter or so. It's like a whole week of ticket refinement meetings. Or perhaps 3 days, but when you've had 3 days of ticket refinement meetings, it might as well be the whole work week for as much a stuff as you're going to get done otherwise.
  
  It's as horrible as you're thinking, and after a lot of agitating, we stopped doing that shit.

Lol imagine having management that give a shit about anything but firing as many workers as possible to make themselves look better. Deloitte can suck my fat fucking balls.

I worked for a company that Deloitte had contracts with. I thought they were shit only in Brazil but it looks like they are worldwide.
A friend of mine works for Deloitte, can you tell me more?
- Terrible pay (like wildly below market), shit PTO, meaningless work...

What what? I thought agile means you don't have to plan!

Nah. It doesn't say not to plan. It says to prefer responding to change over planning. Which means both happen but responding to change is more crucial. Or put another way don't let your plan get in the way of responding to change.

I'm sure you were being sarcastic, but I get kind of tired of the Agile strawman and people shitting on it. It's not a complex philosophy yet people extrapolate so much (too much) and then get annoyed when their assumptions don't pan out well. even performing sprints is an extrapolation, so this meme gets it wrong too.
- Found the scrum master.
- Well that's largely because so few companies are doing agile correctly. Its usually some form of agilefall.
I think Dylan Beattie once said: If you don't have a plan, how can you choose not to follow it?

Every dev loves agile until they have to have a conversation with the users.

Bias on show : trad PM from the past .

As a dev, I think agile works best when there's an ongoing conversation with the users, and I usually have to fight with management to get to speak to those actual users.
Tru dat. Agile product management is not the same as agile project management. Agile Project Management is about the ability to figure and changes things along the lines of the predetermined cost and time path (e.g. figuring out features required along the way), not about the agility to prolong/shorten product value proposition time to market.
Do your scrum-using organization put users at the development process?!? I don't think I've seen any Agile¹ organization doing that.

1 - The one with capital "A", that is an antonym of the one with lower cap "a".
- Users can be like clients too though.

I'm so glad I left the industry....

I'm so glad the industry spit me out like a fishbone
- Same, except now I don't know how I'm gonna pay next month's rent. (I was spit out a while ago.)

ugh. we plan user stories by quarters and everything after sprint1 is just generic garbage because it generally depends on the results of sprint1.

Ticket 24987: "Do the needful"
if I'm leading a project, I avoid this by begging POs to give me a sprint 0 where i solo code out all the scaffolding ground work before all the other engineers join the project.

2-3 sprints?! Y'all really flying by the seat of your pants out here huh?

My teammates and I have no trouble planning multiple quarters in advance. If something crops up like some company wide security initiative, or an impactful bug needing fixed, etc then the related work is planned and then gets inserted ahead of some of the previously planned things and that's fine because we're "agile".

I delivered a thing at the end of Q3 when we planned to deliver at the start of Q3? Nobody is surprised because when the interruptions came leadership had to choose which things get pushed back.

I love it. I get clear expectations set in regards to both the "when" and the "what", and every delay/reprioritization that isn't just someone slacking was chosen by management.

I think this may be less about Agile and more that you have a great management team that sets clear priorities and goals. Not every Agile environment is like that.
- I do greatly appreciate my management and general company tech culture, they're great.
  
  I agree with your stance here, because it's part of my point. I tend to see more people bitching about Agile itself and not management or their particular implementation.
  
  The jobs where I was only given enough info to plan 2 - 4 weeks out were so stressful because I frequently felt like I was guessing at which work was important or even actually relevant. Hated it.
  
  Turns out it's a skill issue ;p (on the management level to be clear). Folks, don't let your lazy managers ruin you on a system that can be perfectly fine if done right.
That's not agile.

It's not bad, it's just not agile. Agile exists for projects where that simply isn't possible. Its sacrificing a bit of potential best-case productivity to ensure you don't get worst-case productivity.

The challenge is, in a real org of some size, you’ll suddenly get marketing or customer success asking you for commitments that are very far out, because ad slots have to be booked or a very large customer renewal is coming up.

And some of the normal coping mechanism (beta-branch that spins off stable feature to the general release branch) don’t work for all those requests.

Try as you might, you are going to get far off deadlines that you have to work towards. Not for everything but for more than you’d like.

The stupidly easy solution is to just give them stuff that has already been successfully delivered to production to market, 9 months from now. There's invariably a huge backlog of years worth of successes that marketing wasn't even aware of.
- Feature flags baby. This is how we do it.
  
  Make it live but disabled, have an env prior to prod with them on, for any regressions.
  
  Launching your already comprehensively tested and actually live feature? An easy deployment.
  
  Can someone please tell me how to do this for the BE. Ta.
- Yeah, I agree that might work if the marketing team isn’t that connected to the product. I’ve not worked with a marketing team where that would work, but maybe it will for some. It doesn’t change the “massive customer will only renew if” scenario, though.

I can't pinpoint the exact problem, but corporate agile destroyed software development for me. I completely lost the fun developing software as an employee. I had the most fun on my first project, which was a waterfall one.

The problem is that people realized that they could sell agile training to middle management if they changed it to be about making middle managers feel empowered and giving progress visibility to upper management.
Agile has some good principles, but too often projects are delayed to support the process, when the process exists to support the projects. When a team is more focused on stand-ups and burn down charts than they are on shipping software, then they're no longer agile. Unfortunately that is what happens to a lot of teams that decide to use Agile.

I have experience with our PM and BAs throwing draft stories in mid sprint that required PO follow up. So basically a complete waste of time.