They probably said the word "agile" a lot and then continued doing something else, that seems to be the usual pattern.
> Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.
Which is why it's the product owner's responsibility to prioritise.
The company didn't seem to have issues prioritizing the authors tasks into no mans land. So they seem to have that part down great already. However I find the consistent two week deliveries early on a bit disturbing, in my experience two weeks is exactly one sprint and fixing deliverables to that time window means that you can't really do any agile planing with it, your team just has to accept that this work has to be done and can't give random work that seems to pop up every now and then the attention it deserves. To be really agile and allow your sprint planing to reflect that you shouldn't promise anything in time spans less than two months.
Probably not. Larger relatively successful design / marketing agencies are - based on my experience - poorly run, poorly managed, and poorly led. This gets exasperated by high turn-over (read: good people leave, dead weight stays behind).
Training, etc.? Not a priority. Revenue, it's all about revenue. They're "creatives", not business problem-solver types and presume mess and excessive friction are unavoidable.
Of course it would be much better if the agency were honest, but if for seven months the deliverables were only "promises", then it's definitely not agile...
That's pretty much untrue; had this project been a waterfall project then:
a) The devs would not have gotten paid until they hit particular milestones,
b) The deliverables would have been scoped upfront,
c) The agency would have eaten the cost of developing useless things, not the customer.
Because this was obviously an agile/Agile project:
a) The payment milestones were not specified upfront,
b) The devliverables remained unscoped until feedback was needed (which was well into the development phase),
c) The client eats the cost of developers time, whether or not milestones are hit.
Agile is not a guarantee of deliverables you care about. There is a lot of useless stuff you can deliver.