The Death Of Agile.
Early this summer, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Agile Denver. While I was there, something felt off. We had a booth and sponsored the event. In the past, when we sponsor the people we talk to, they’re buyers. There may be a few job seekers interspersed into the crowd, but most people are happy employed and looking to collaborate. This time, that wasn’t the case. It felt like the conference was for the unemployed. A sea of Agile coaches and SCRUM masters congratulating themselves and complaining about how their remaining clients “still just don’t get it” or are doing “Agile wrong”. Everyone sharing war stories of layoffs and how the “company [that fired them] is screwed” without them. All while a job board towered over the main hall with over a dozen names of people looking for work, and zero companies hiring.
I don’t hear people talking about Agile and SCRUM in the enterprise anymore. Why? Because it’s done. It’s implemented. Every company that wants Agile has a form of it. They have hired their SCRUM masters, their coaches, and their consultants. They have moved from the Waterfall frameworks of the past to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Frameworks of the future, deploying every week or two rather than every quarter or two. Companies have embraced cloud technology where appropriate, allowing rapid provisioning of infrastructure for developers. They have put together two-pizza teams and have set up the ceremonies to shorten feedback loops. The enterprise has checked all the Agile boxes, and the companies that haven’t, frankly, just don’t want to, or don’t need to.
The Agile implementation at these businesses isn’t perfect, but who cares? They may not be Agile, but they definitely have embraced agility. A nuance that seemed to escape a good number of the Agile professionals at this conference.
领英推荐
Agile and developer productivity used to be where all the value lived. Enterprises needed to speed up developers to maintain relevance, avoiding the disruption of a much more nimble up-and-comer. As these enterprises embraced a digital transformation, making cohorts of developers more productive, the business could participate in the digital gold rush, rapidly reacting to the experiential pressure of the digital natives.
As more people, and more importantly, more companies entered the ranks of the “digitally transformed,” developer productivity and production productivity reached local maximums, and Agile implementations became an optimization of an already high-functioning system, not a step toward the function increase in productivity that the initial shift from Waterfall to Agile provided. Returns had diminished to the point of irrelevance. So, the Agile conversation died, and along with it, the job title of Agile, SCRUM, and whatever else died too.
This feels like a win.
Engineering Leadership. Ex-PayPal/Braintree/Venmo
6 个月Industry and Product are moving at light speed these days, creating for a lot of chaos if textbook Agile is implemented. I have always said it's as much fingerprint as it is framework. But these days, more fingerprint, leaning more XP.
I help companies innovate by planning and implementing the right software and technology.
6 个月I think the formalism and the industry built around it is dying or has died. We still see a lot of companies in slower to move industries needing coached, but it's not coaching on "agile" so much as just how things should be done and designing a process around your team and needs. It feels like we're finally on the other side of the shift, where the principles of self managing teams, and no one size fits all processes are closer to standard now.
Delivering products with power- SaaS, CRM, Loyalty, Marketing, Lean Teams
6 个月Austin V. - it has a new name "Go Faster!"; I've watched the methodology go through a blender and generational versioning over the years with some characteristics implemented poorly slowing product progress down. My overall thought is, Agile in itself has gone through an evolutionary phase that few may realize. I do have a new name for it but the book isn't out yet.