20 odd years ago, Agile was a revolution in methodology and some say a revolution in business objectives, all set down in some now-well-known principles from the last '90s.
But, has there not been an evolution in the last two decades?
Mike Cohn, a spearhead in the Scrum world to be sure, says this:
Originally, agile meant valuing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.He's probably right on this.
Agile was about cross-functional teams working closely together to innovate new products or solutions that couldn’t have been developed any other way.
These days agile seems to be about
- Improving productivity,
- Reducing work in process,
- Increasing velocity in any way possible,
- Holding teams accountable for finishing everything they say they will, and,
- Doing just enough that an organization can call itself agile without really being agile.
So, what happened?
For agile to be anything other than a cottage industry, it had to marry up with serious business people who put up the money and expect effective functional results in-line with business objectives.
And, being a capitalist economy, projects have always had to line up with capitalist objectives:
- Relentless drive to reduce cost,
- Produce more, and
- Drive the bottom line (profit margin)
It's not personal, it's business!
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