Agile : Have Enterprises losing the Plot the Water Fall way?

I was having a casual conversation with my Wife who is a school teacher and she was upset at something. Normally we do not discuss anything on the professional front at home. 

I prodded her a bit and tried to find out what was the reason out of curiosity. The school management is planning for ISO certification and processes were to be followed there will be annual audits and it adds a burden on the teachers.  

The kids have a weekly library period that allows them to read book of their choice.As part of ISO processes the management wanted the teachers to measure the new verbs learnt by the children  as part of the weekly library period.

My wife felt in this digital age where reading habits have changed, the joy of reading will be lost in asking children to ask for verbs learnt. My daughter who is moving to 6th standard overheard the conversation and said she will not take any books if that was the case. Basically the school is forced to measure this  as part of continuous feedback adopting ISO processes.

I  tried to map this to the Value Stream of any Enterprise, from the context of the school the Value Stream will be to enable free thinking and providing a platform for acquiring knowledge. Here  the issue is the school is looking at the ISO  to determine changes to the ways of working of the school. I would have preferred if they decide that as part of the schools value stream they decided on a gamification platform for the school kids to measure the knowledge from library period  and not dictated by processes.

This kept me thinking on IT industry and way we adopted processes. We had CMMi, ISO and other quality processes that IT adopted and industrialized the same. This meant that we all started wearing blinders and just kept doing what we were told, innovation was the biggest loser.

Agile movement started as a Anti-Establishment to move away from traditional enterprise waterfall models and do away with process and focus on value. The Dot Com and start ups wanted to look at ways of providing faster value and adopted processes that are agile, iterative and leveraging lean principles.

It took a whole lot of time for Enterprises to get to start adopting Agile and believed Agile as a Pancreas to all their problems. The Tools / Platform vendors provided support and a whole eco system of Tooling / Agile coaches / training got enabled. 

Enterprises when adopting agile started by  standardizing processes leveraging the Agile Tool set. Enterprise seems to be focused in ceremonies , measuring metrics like , burn down , velocity etc.The fundamental element of Agile which is Focusing on Business Value via collaboration, automation and  continuously improving the value stream seems to be completely lost.

The real challenge  for Enterprises is to making sure that they do not fall into the same  the waterfall way of doing things, The focus should be on business value tied to the Business KPI's and aligning the entire team to map to the them.

The enterprises should measure the business KPIs and allow scrum teams the freedom to decide their ways of working. This is where the innovation happens and not blided by processes and ceremonies.