Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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I read the recent Voke report, Agile Realities, with interest, and with increasing levels of frustration. It makes a number of valid points but these are lost due to the fundamental flaw in the report, which is neatly set out in the assumptions. The premise of the report is that Agile, when implemented according to the approach set out by Agile evangelists (my words not theirs) is developer-centric and prone to failure. Now there’s a big surprise.

I’m not normally prone to reactionary statements, but in my opinion this approach renders the whole report a waste of time. Suggesting that Agile precludes Ops or QA, and that specialist roles such as architecture are lost, is simply wrong.  

The report contuninally refers to Agile as a developer-centric approach, but this need not, and should not be the case.  The authors describe the Agile Dilema as "the inherant risk and confusion created when the business desire for speed and flexibility is misinterpreted as a mandate to participate in the developer-centric Agile movement".  My view of Agile (and that of IndigoBlue) is significantly more pragmatic, and not developer-centric. Fundementally Agile should be concerned with incremental delivery of value to enable business agility and this should include all of the participants normally associated with a change programme.  

It is clear that there are organisations that have implemented Agile from a developer centric perspective (primarily using Scrum) but in my experience few of these have done so in the fundamentalist way outlined in the report. Moreover, there are a growing number of organisations that recognise the real world constraints in which Agile must exist and have adapted the basic processes accordingly, in doing so they have addressed  the deficiencies that are assumed by the authors to be inherent in the approach.  

I could rant for some time, but I’ll try to be more constructive. The report highlights the dangers of implementing Agile as a developer-centric approach; something IndigoBlue has been saying for over 10 years. In that context it is useful. However, it would have had significantly more value if it had been conducted in a more open-minded fashion.

Finally, if the authors need a definition of Agile, then surely it is the incremental delivery of business value.  Not the develop-centric approach to code-crunching described in the report.