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Agilists Will Need To Embrace a New Strategy If Agile is to Survive
Blaming “clueless” business people simply won’t cut it any longer
I’ve been involved in five Agile Transformations over my 10 years as an Agile consultant, coach, and trainer.
The engagements spanned multiple consultancies, and these are some reflections as I’m now on my third Agile Transformation in the past 5 years in-house at KeyBank, one of the top-20 U.S. banks.
I started my Agile journey by focusing on all the wonderful things Agile and Scrum could do for an organization.
Just start “being Agile,” and everything would be great!
Agile off-track?
But I wondered why many of the organizations that had undergone Agile Transformations weren’t doing much “better.”
Despite the fact that Agile processes may or may not have been present to a greater or lesser degree, it was clear the same business problems were still there.
Agile’s grounding in Extreme Programming (“XP”) started from a focus on technical excellence. But over time, I’ve seen Agile lose its grounding in the craft of coding, and become just another project management method.
Worse, I’ve also seen it veer down a path towards a form of “faith,” where “true believers” tirelessly quote “doctrine” — The Agile Manifesto & The Scrum Guide.
Why Agile?
In early 2023, perhaps taking their cue from Elon Musk’s radical staff cuts at Twitter/X, CapitalOne eliminated every “Agile” role, cutting over 1100 jobs, sending shockwaves throughout the tech world.
Coupled with this, there continue to be scores of layoffs across all Agile roles.
And this leads me to wonder whether Agile practitioners have been focusing on the right problems.
Becoming “Agile” was never the point
And I believe we’ve all been asking the wrong question all along.
One only needs to look as far as Nokia’s spectacular failure even as they achieved the largest “successful” Scrum transformation ever. It’s painfully obvious just “being…
