Doing Agile (and not much else)

I hated seeing it

It gave consultancy a bad name and there were no glowing reviews for these performances. Their bad behaviour also tarnished those of us who were doing good, valuable work, improving product profitability and release timescales for realistic fees.

After a couple of stints in exec roles, I’ve gone back to consultancy and I’m sad to see some people are still out there swindling. This time they’ve employed Michael Bay level special effects from the latest collaboration tools and other expensive SaaS products that make the latest fad in process change somehow appear sexy and adventurous. Far from being agile transformers, they are bringing organisational and commercial armageddon to a business near you.

Of course, there were some product practitioners that failed with a fee, but without malicious intent. There were usually two reasons for this:

• The agile transformation was wrongly assumed to also be looking at external inputs to the product delivery and proposition launch process, such as the source of market data, understanding of customer propensity, pricing, sales funnels and many other commercial factors

• The business went into a split-brain mode, with an old guard of management and staff defending their traditional ground and carrying on business as usual behind the scenes, while the transformation team failed to get the traction and support it needed to make real change happen

Either way, the result was failure — wasted time to market, money down the drain and a loss of reputation for both the consultant and the business being served.

Now the confidence tricksters have started to expand well outside their areas of expertise, claiming Agile is for Sales/Marketing/HR/Finance too. “Transformation or market damnation; the only two paths for business” — they preach from the alter of agility. Confidence is gained from a pervasive industry narrative that actively promotes change for the sake of change.

Of course, some of those agile principles are appropriate for departments other than Product, however not in every organisation and often not by the textbook. I dread to think how much time has been wasted by Accounts Receivable clerks explaining “what I did yesterday and what I’ll do today” to an equally uninterested group.