When I was hired, they said they were Agile/SCRUM. They're not. They're SAFe/Waterfall. They don't really care about Agile methodologies or SCRUM practices. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of points, sprints, velocity, empowered developers, and autonomous development teams. They don't even understand the basic conflicts between SAFe and Agile. They really think SAFe is Agile. They have an addition to ticketing systems. You can't do ANYTHING without creating a ticket and watching the ticket work it's way through the lengthy approval process. I recently had to create a ticket that required 9 approvals. So far, I have 4 of them after about 45 days. I haven't spoken to a person regarding my request yet. They want you to be fast, responsive, productive, and "agile", but then they saddle you with a cumbersome waterfall process. You don't have input into the process and have no power to effect change, which does nothing but breed apathy. They can't even tell you why the process is what it is. The only two reasons I have heard is "it's the way it has always been done" and "the VP said we had to". Sometimes that person is no longer with the company. It's more likely that the person just didn't understand enough to know what they were asking for and no one felt empowered enough to question it. ... and God help you if you question anything. If you mention that the process is unreasonable or that they 're not really Agile/SCRUM, you are branded a troublemaker. If you speak up in meetings, but don't toe the line, you're labeled as disruptive. When I joined, I was warned about people on my team being disruptive. The warnings kept coming, until it was realized that I too was "disruptive." If you want to stay at LPL long term, you have to embrace the LPL way and sell your soul to live it, but at least the people are nice and the pay is good.
