Agile

I have no experience of Agile – so let me offer the interesting views of John Seddon, Vanguard Consultants – taken from his book ‘Beyond Command and Control’

AGILE:

• An approach first developed for software development, because of all the failures of large-scale IT systems
• Then, an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Embracing Agile’ followed which said, given its success to date, it should become the go-to means for organisation-wide transformation
• But its success record has not been good
• The government’s Universal Credit project is an appalling example
• Vanguard soon came to regard it as ‘the most dysfunctional management fad we have ever come across’
  • It assumes IT features are always beneficial
  • There’s no recognition of what IT should and should not be employed to do
  • It dreams up things to create rather than grounding change in knowledge of the likely outcomes
  • There’s no recognition of the importance of knowledge as the right starting-place
  • ‘Stories’ are inappropriate representations of reality
  • Cost control drives delivery of IT rather than effectiveness
• Real customers’ needs are not understood, so not met