Rise to Fame and Fall from Grace
Agile is Mostly Dead
From Revolution to Resurrection
In the whirlwind world of technology, the agile movement once stood as a revolutionary juggernaut, reshaping the landscape for companies like Google, Facebook, and Airbnb. Yet, as we approach its two-decade anniversary, it’s fair to say that the agile movement, like a beloved superhero who’s lost their way, has met its share of challenges. The final nail in the agile coffin? None other than McKinsey introduced the intriguing notion of an “agile transformation office.”
It was penned by a group of self-described “organizational anarchists” from the software industry at a ski resort in Utah back in February 2001. The Agile Manifesto gave rise to the Agile movement, a movement to promote the use of Agile principles to build better software. Two decades later the movement was a superhero. Agile’s underlying principles and values were table stakes for any organization. The degree to which an organization was applying agile was a matter of small increments of productivity rather than a revolutionary game-changer. Back in the day, Agile was the fresh breeze blowing through the stuffy boardrooms of tech companies. It was a mantra that preached customer collaboration over tedious contract negotiations, put individuals above tedious processes, championed…
