The hanger on the subject of "agile"

"Agile" probably just means that they can do what they want. As a boss, you no longer have a chance to tell them what to do. I tried that once. As usual, I went to Paolo, my chief developer, and told him that I needed a list of the capacity utilization of the product database and whether he could make a button for it in the admin screen. He gives me a big look and asks if it's already in the backlog. If it wasn't in the backlog, he wouldn't be able to do it. "How?" I say, "in which backlog?" Then he tells me that I should talk to Charlie from product management, he's the "product owner" and would decide what goes into the backlog, so I ask you, how am I supposed to do my job like that? Since then, every time I want something from the team, Dieter comes to me and tells me that I'm an "impediment". I didn't know what that was at first, but I didn't tell him. Then I looked it up. It means obstacle. Great, I think, I just want to make progress with the product and now I'm being turned into an obstacle. Just because they work in an "agile" way and are now "self-organized". If I had known that beforehand ... And now my boss tells me that we are now "scaling agilely". Do you know what that means? Now I and the other department heads are supposed to work in a team like that. How is that supposed to work? We're not going to make any progress if we're also going round in circles at management level. And dealing with esoteric stuff like Kanban boards. No, I'm not going to go along with that. Not with Hubi. It's about time we had clear relationships and control again. Exactly. Tomorrow I'll call the board and tell them that.