If a developer places an idea up requiring only 4 points, can they pin their own 4 points to it and work on it alone without having to answer to anyone?
The entire point of the 20% concept to me is that I get to work on my own idea. I do not like your version that makes it a popularity contest between developers and their separate ideas. Most of the fun that can be found in 20% is the lack of constraints and oversight. The 20% should not have to be justified to anyone, let alone planned out and required to fit within a single sprint.
To be fair, I despise agile (or is it capitalized Agile?) in all its bullshit incarnations. The most interesting aspect of a 20% project is that the business keeps its filthy hands out of my time. Applying agile into the 20% makes me sick.
I've been through the agile process at 5 different companies, and it has never been successful. My biggest issue is with the people who are brought in to implement it. The scrum masters always try to spin the whole thing as a positive for both the development team and the business. Both the team and the business's management are supposed to be disciplined. But the scrum masters always wind up being scum masters, always bowing to the will of the business's management. Meanwhile the team is left with nobody to defend their right to have the process respected.
The primary selling point is always the removal of the "old waterfall method". And yet every single sprint, 20-40-80 hours worth of "more urgent tasks" get dropped in without proper grooming or advanced planning. Whether or not other tasks get removed from the sprint to equalize the incoming work does nothing to alleviate the frustration.
Every agile process I have seen always winds up being the same old bullshit of management having no discipline to actually follow the rules. We call it agile, but it's still just waterfall glossed over with a name - with none of the actual principles being taken seriously.
Ok, I can see why you might be jaded about it! I've had very different experiences, and, as you say, it probably depends on the people who are implementing it - the discipline is very important, and perhaps we were fortunate in that regard without realising it, because it was something we implemented as a group rather than being imposed on us from above.
Yep, a developer can work on their own 4-point project and doesn't require collaborating with anyone or any oversight other than approval from a PM before making it live if it is a user-facing feature.
The only requirement is documenting how the project is good for Kiva. Some people would like to do something like say go learn Perl with their time. That's great for the person, but better covered by the professional development budget than innovation iteration. So, sometimes something like that gets shot down, but it's rare.
The entire point of the 20% concept to me is that I get to work on my own idea. I do not like your version that makes it a popularity contest between developers and their separate ideas. Most of the fun that can be found in 20% is the lack of constraints and oversight. The 20% should not have to be justified to anyone, let alone planned out and required to fit within a single sprint.
To be fair, I despise agile (or is it capitalized Agile?) in all its bullshit incarnations. The most interesting aspect of a 20% project is that the business keeps its filthy hands out of my time. Applying agile into the 20% makes me sick.