Phillippe Krutchen posted about “elephant in the room” from the 10 year reunion of the Agile Snowbird meeting. His comments resonated not only with me, but wioth those in our community of agile in the defense and government business.
Some primary issues are defined.
- Commercial interests censors failures - no basis of comparison, bad process improvement measures
- Context is missing - One Size Does Not Fit All is known, but the details of the right domain and context are rarely defined by the "thought leaders."
- Business value is not defined in any units meaningful to the business - this is not allowed in Earned Value
- Self organizing teams are counter to large business processes - rarely can corporate project have dedicated teams in the way the "thought leaders" describe.
- Technical debt hides the effectiveness of agile process - this is not allowed in Earned Value.
- Architecture is missing - in the corporate and government world architecture is king.
- Scaling is naive - this is the case for any method, why doesn't agile address this directly.
I'll add a few of my own
- Dogma is the starting point
- Domain is missing
- Self proclaimed guru's don't work the programs, they speak in theory not practice
- Agile project management is not the same as Agile Software Development.
My final point is that all agile proponents must read John Goodpasture's book Project Management the Agile Way. John is the only person outside our community that has a rational approach to applying agile to enterprise programs.
