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