Re:Agile Is Dead, McKinsey Just Killed It
by motohagiography on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @09:35AM
(#28616139)
The agile envirionments I've worked in have been preferable, and I'm for whatever gets things done. The manifesto and resulting method showed a clear understanding of the problem they were solving, what I don't think they understood is why waterfall "worked" and what "worked" meant.
Not sure if they have a word for it now, but I call it The Fold, above which, the organization is not agile, and still operates on a dynamic narrative of representations, impressions, commitments and dates without anything concrete, and to people above it, that is a feature.
The concreteness of agile becomes a set of forcing functions on people whose job is to sustain options ("optionality") and not be subject to be forcing functions, but rather, to issue them.
I'm all for the agile anti-governance to make things, but what an enterprise business really is is a governance layer extacting value from capital in an as-abstracted and generic way as possible, where products, people, infrastructure, are interchangeable black boxes in balancing that capital management equation. Making "things" doesn't matter in an enterprise, as the whole business is just a narrative over abstractions of those things.
The flow of the factors and the yield on that capital is directed by the attention and narrative at the executive level between organizations - not by making stuff. What agile practitioners miss is that sometimes, a general sends a platoon on a (career) suicide mission because that's just what's necessary to sustain this yielding narrative that steers the organization. Agile was designed to preclude those missions, which are a key tool in an executive playbook.
That's just in enterprise. I have stumped a couple of agile coach friends with the startup puzzle, "for the company to survive, we need to get another round of investment. To get that, we need prestige customer X in our pipeline because the investors say they are in if this customer is. Customer X wants this feature because their contract with our competitor is coming up, and we have this short window to close this and replace them. It means we need an un-agile date commitment with some tech debt to demonstrate we can execute, or we run out of money. Agile me this."
Most of the answers are counterfactual, where it's "well, you shouldn't have got into that situation." I even agree, where personally, I wouldn't have got into that disadvantaged relationship with just one customer in the first place because I know how that works, but I have watched a few execs die on that hill, and this is a common pattern that happens when sales gets ahead of PMF - you're going to get snookered in front of a date. I'd argue that any method that depends on its own purity is really just a model or an ideology, and not a solution.
What McKinsey will need to do is create the connecting glue between agile production and the narrative business atmosphere, so I'd say agile is not dead, it's being integrated.
Not sure if they have a word for it now, but I call it The Fold, above which, the organization is not agile, and still operates on a dynamic narrative of representations, impressions, commitments and dates without anything concrete, and to people above it, that is a feature.
The concreteness of agile becomes a set of forcing functions on people whose job is to sustain options ("optionality") and not be subject to be forcing functions, but rather, to issue them.
I'm all for the agile anti-governance to make things, but what an enterprise business really is is a governance layer extacting value from capital in an as-abstracted and generic way as possible, where products, people, infrastructure, are interchangeable black boxes in balancing that capital management equation. Making "things" doesn't matter in an enterprise, as the whole business is just a narrative over abstractions of those things.
The flow of the factors and the yield on that capital is directed by the attention and narrative at the executive level between organizations - not by making stuff. What agile practitioners miss is that sometimes, a general sends a platoon on a (career) suicide mission because that's just what's necessary to sustain this yielding narrative that steers the organization. Agile was designed to preclude those missions, which are a key tool in an executive playbook.
That's just in enterprise. I have stumped a couple of agile coach friends with the startup puzzle, "for the company to survive, we need to get another round of investment. To get that, we need prestige customer X in our pipeline because the investors say they are in if this customer is. Customer X wants this feature because their contract with our competitor is coming up, and we have this short window to close this and replace them. It means we need an un-agile date commitment with some tech debt to demonstrate we can execute, or we run out of money. Agile me this."
Most of the answers are counterfactual, where it's "well, you shouldn't have got into that situation." I even agree, where personally, I wouldn't have got into that disadvantaged relationship with just one customer in the first place because I know how that works, but I have watched a few execs die on that hill, and this is a common pattern that happens when sales gets ahead of PMF - you're going to get snookered in front of a date. I'd argue that any method that depends on its own purity is really just a model or an ideology, and not a solution.
What McKinsey will need to do is create the connecting glue between agile production and the narrative business atmosphere, so I'd say agile is not dead, it's being integrated.