Is Agile dead?
I’m seeing posts here from some pretty smart people asking that question, including this one from Simon Powers (thanks, Gianpaolo Baglione!).
Let me weigh in and toss out where my head is on this.
First, it’s clear that Agile consulting is in a reset, and possibly devalued permanently. There are a bunch of reasons, and I’ll write more about these later. Or now, let’s just stipulate it, and say that the product-market fit isn’t there.
I want to suggest two possibly novel reasons why that is.
First, because we did our jobs about as well as they reasonably could be done. We typically were hired to “make IT agile” and most IT has gone through the process of ‘trying agile on”. And right now, for many of them, it’s sitting draped over the exercise bike in the guest room.
Why is that? – that’s the interesting question.
And I think the answer is that we sold what we were asked for and didn’t step back and ask what was really needed – and that given the sociology of the industry, we lacked the chips to play to get invited to that ask. We forgot the first thing we’re supposedly taught, and that is to take a systems view.
And IT isn’t the system. It’s a subcomponent of the system that is incapable of changing past limits set by the system as a whole. What does that system look like?
Well, let’s call IT an information factory. Upstream of it is the product space – where we decide what the factory makes – and downstream of it is operations, where we actually turn the boxes of product the factory makes into transactions. Agile is pretty good at building high-performing information factories. In technology, it’s pretty good at building low-friction, high-performing operations (DevOps).
It's so-so at product development (immature but moving to maturity).
And underlaying all of these is a layer of what I’ll call management – strategy, coordination, and finance. Agile basically has little to say to this world (which is all about power and money, ultimately).
So we filled the container available to us. But because we didn’t look at the whole system, we didn’t have the impact that would have really paid off in building healthier, more adaptive organizations. We saved money and delivered value within the IT box – but outside of it, not so much.
And because we didn’t change the whole system, the change we made within IT didn’t grow deep roots.
So where does the future lie? Look at the picture. Procedural Agile is mature (hence dark blue) as is DevOps. Product agility is a lighter blue, because the patterns aren’t baked yet – but they are in the oven.
I don’t think (as an industry – there may be individual folks) – we have a lot to say about management and operational agility. Yet.
Well, there continues to be a market for what I call ‘procedural agile’ – designing and implementing efficient and effective information factories. But we’d all better adjust our expectations of what that work is worth and who is likely to buy it.
DevOps is a super rich market, but a really hard sale. The folks who typically buy or hire agile services are scared of the Unix geeks and reluctant to push them to change – which means if you’re not someone with credibility in that space, you’re going to struggle to have traction.
Product agility is the near term win – at Eliassen, we did far better than our competition last year (yay!!) and I attribute that to some innovative folks who helped bring product agility to our customer base.
But the big wins will be in operational agility outside of IT – and in sitting down and figuring out a path to management agility.
And I think a great project for the smart folks in our industry would be to be thinking about what those might look like.