Have We Reached Peak Agile?
Stefan Wolpers
?? I help Product Owners, Product Managers, Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches Grow w/ Classes, Courses, Books & Community. ?? Author of the ”Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide;” ??Trainer at Scrum.org; ?? Book a 1-on-1; talk chances!
TL; DR: Have we reached Peak Agile?
There has never been a shortage of articles claiming that Agile is either dead, failing, disrespectful, or useless, with authors ranging from respected signatories of the Agile Manifesto to click baiters to people who never experienced the real thing in the first thus lacking a standard for comparison. (See the links below.)
The question from my perspective, though, is: Have we finally have reached peak agile?
Why I Am Concerned that the Peak Might Be Near
Some readers may know that I curate a weekly newsletter called Food for Agile Thought. I source my content mainly from more than 1,700 RSS feeds I check for interesting articles. I also scan other sources like newsletters and communities such as Reddit (reluctantly) or Hackernoon.
Over recent months, I have noticed a few things that made me think:
- The agile-industrial complex is embracing ‘agile’ to ensure further growth by addressing the issues they sold one or two decades earlier, such as the shareholder value approach. (See some recent McKinsey posts, for example, such as Building agile capabilities: The fuel to power your agile ‘body.’)
- The incumbents are on the move. For example, the Project Management Institute is on a shopping spree to bolster its competence in the agile domain, acquiring Disciplined Agile and FLEX.
- Within the community, meaningful discourse seems to become harder even among those that claim to embrace communication. Support the notion that ‘agile’ is disrespecting the ‘developer’ on Hackernoon, and engagement is ensured—it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. (In my opinion, this partisan divide at the cost of the competition of ideas also points at peak agile.)
- While certificates prove to a valuable investment from a practitioner’s perspective, see the Scrum Master Trends Report 2019, there is an unhealthy obsession with collecting them on the business side. (I increasingly receive inquiries from HR folks that explicitly define the purpose of a Scrum workshop to obtain certificates for all participants. The laggards are trying to catch up by applying their traditional approach to becoming agile: “roll-outs” based on top-down decisions triggering initiative centered around outsourcing the hard part to consultancies and mass-training employees.)
- Are you an aspiring thought leader? Just add ‘agile’ to any niche, and you are good to go: agile marketing, agile HR, agile whatever. (Which, by the way, makes discovering signal in the noise so much more laborious.)
- Finally, new relevant content is created both at a lower rate and is becoming significantly more specialized, thus addressing a smaller audience. At the same time, there is an increase in content produced for marketing and SEO purposes, remixing existing content.
What is your experience? Please join our discussion.
Peak Agile — Related Content
Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility).
Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible.
Agile Transformation Coach -Agile, Scrum, DevOps & Behavior Driven Development - Project Management -Trainer and Teacher
4 年Stefan Wolpers it took a while but eventually I wrote an answer to your post: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/long-slowdown-paul-versteeg/
I see more and more people working harder every day but not getting nearer to the target. It feels like some burn-outs are nearer than ever before. I have the impression that agile without some leadership will not work...
Senior Agile Project Manager at b-next group
5 年Peak window dressing?
"Authenticity is what inspires people. If you want to lead people, you have to show them who you really are."
5 年Agile isn't dead. It's lost. When you have McKinsey and others who are so waterfall in how they operate internally, you're bound to have artifacts that aren't linked to value and the desire for certificates, because in the Enterprise, it's still about CYA. From a business management perspective, the unintended consequence of things like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is it makes it increasingly difficult to experiment. Funding and resource acquisition are highly gated in bureaucracy and functions outside of product and tech are so far from embracing lean and agile. Until the entire org embraces agile, your agile team is the equivalent of a microservices or set of microservices encapsulated in an inefficient monolith. The next plateau to attain in agile is when business management and compliance functions can be aligned with continuous learning. Psychological safety as a prerequisite, per Joshua Kerievsky, hasn't yet seeped into the consciousness outside of tech/product. Even HR, who should be the biggest supporter and enabler of this, are not empowered to support this foundational aspect of agility.
AI Consultant/Agile Coach/Start-ups
5 年I agree that certifications add little value. A good Agile Coach should have at least 5 years experience in incrementally transitioning a project portfolio from waterfall to agile. Also, a good Agile coach needs strong leadership and communication skills. Experience in change management and kaizen is also highly desirable. I certainly do not think Ireland has reached a peak in agile enablement projects as many companies are only dipping their toes in the water. Maybe North America is further down the road with respect to agile maturity.