Say you are in the software business for a while, and you worked with many different organizations on software projects. Say all of them adopted an agile process, and you had more than your fair share of standups, burndowns, sprints, release trains and stuff. Now, say someone asks you to draw a picture of #agile, will that be like this?
No. Effing. Way.
I’m by far not the first one on the agile is dead bangwagon. There is a practically infinite corpus citing how agile is broken, whether because it lends itself to oversimplifying our profession or because it’s just a hype come to its end.
Set aside all the good intentions and compelling ethics, Agile became way too meta for it to be any good to anyone. In search for the exact science of process management, people thought it was in the best interest of everyone to create standards over standards of supposedly battle-proven methodologies.
This is what we actually got (image courtesy of Deloitte):
The author of this complex diagram was trying to shed some light on the current plethora of Agile methodologies that people have been implementing, and while the result is horrifying from anyone interested into Getting Things Done, it’s spot on the very issue we have at hand: there is no exact science of management. We, as a whole industry, should be get over it already.
I believe we’re now at the Agile antithesis. The hype cycle is now at the end of the Disillusionment deep, and already getting into Productivity. The gospel has been introspected and it’s simply not a thing to speak of agile anymore.
Eventually, we’re in the post-agile era already, and we need our IT managers to truly understand what they role really is, we need them to do their job and understand where the agile script works, where it doesn’t and ultimately where it enables the whole organization to really work as it should.
Amen.