Paradise Found?

So what is Agile?

At first glance the Agile Manifesto looks like something a bunch of developers came up with after sampling the wrong Kool Aid and discovering the Mommas and the Poppas in their parents record collection, a weird IT version of Das Kapital, power to the developers, transparent management, peace love and mung beans.

What it actually tries to do is put the power and responsibility into the hands of those who are best capable of wielding it and those who are accountable respectively, to remove the traditional blame storm that comes at the end of a project when the Sponsor blames the developers for building the wrong thing and the developers the Sponsor for telling them to.

Generally the fatal error made by all Project Owners is they say what they want you to do not what they are trying to achieve which inevitably leads to project failure as the developers do exactly what they are told not what they know they should. As a developer and project manager I've lost count of the number of times I've said or heard someone in a development team say "Tell us the problem you're trying to solve, not what you want us to do!".

The point of Agile is to go with short sharp iterations that allow you to change direction quickly and easily to get around unforeseen issues. No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy so the best way to deal with that is to be able to change your plan at short notice and allow the people on the ground to decide how best to get around an obstacle. By allowing the right people to make decisions to reach an outcome rather than defining the steps to get there up front, you get the right solution and this is what Agile allows you to do

So we all started using Agile and lived happily ever after.

Unfortunately it's not that simple...