> So are we trying to help teams of experts or the clueless and/or terminally lazy here?
Me? I'm trying to help teams of smart, well-intentioned people. Which is why I'm happy to share what's worked for me and encourage people to try those things if they're interested. That's what motivates the early Agile people I know.
But consultants are mostly in business to make money, and the bulk of their audience is clueless, so most of what gets sold as Agile today is tuned for them. I go into more detail on that here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
> Also, experts will evolve a workable process for any given project without needing to follow any particular Agile process to start with. That's one of the reasons they're experts.
True, but that ignores the people who aren't experts yet. They're the ones I care most about. And it ignores the substantial costs of learning all the important lessons yourself; it's often better not to reinvent the wheel.
> [..] teams within a large organisation [...]
Personally, despite 10 years of looking, I have never seen teams within a large organization successfully adopt what I would consider a serious Agile approach. I have seen a lot of large organizations adopt Agile jargon and get nothing out of it, though.
The problem is that Agile methods require a shift in power relations from top-down to bottom-up. Their approaches and values are basically antithetical to a lot of American business culture and MBA dogma. And successful exploitation requires deep change on the business side as well.
I think Agile failed for the same reason that Lean Manufacturing failed here: the important part wasn't the easily observed rituals, but the cultural differences. And the vast majority of the people who are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) would not accept deep cultural change.
At the risk of stating the obvious, has it occurred to you that the reason you have never seen a teams in large organisations adopt Agile successfully is that the basic philosophy of Agile doesn't scale to large projects?
You can get away with a lot of informality and doing things on-the-fly for small projects, when everyone involved can get around the same table in a meeting room and a single expert from the customer side can make all significant decisions. When your project team is made from 200 people divided among geographically and temporally diverse teams and the customer for your business management software is a 100,000 employee global corporation trying to co-ordinate the activities of six divisions in five key areas? Not so much.
Why yes, that has occurred to me. It's possible. But I doubt it for reasons I explained above. The few successful Lean Manufacturing adoptees in the US are on the smaller side as well. That's not because it doesn't scale, as Toyota is now the world's largest car manufacturer. It's because small companies can make cultural changes more easily. See the This American Life episode on NUMMI for a poignant illustration of that.
I think the answer to this question in software will come from companies that have started small with something like XP and grown into large companies. I suspect you'll end up with something like the cellular model that bodies use to scale. That's how it seems to be going at the companies I've visited. One startup I know is at 50 or so engineers and they are doing fine with a lot of small teams working semi-independently, releasing daily, and coordinating as they see fit. Or take YouTube. They have a few hundred people but they maintain a weekly (or more often) release schedule, power works in a bottom-up fashion, product management is decentralized, and the teams are loosely joined. It works fine for them.
Me? I'm trying to help teams of smart, well-intentioned people. Which is why I'm happy to share what's worked for me and encourage people to try those things if they're interested. That's what motivates the early Agile people I know.
But consultants are mostly in business to make money, and the bulk of their audience is clueless, so most of what gets sold as Agile today is tuned for them. I go into more detail on that here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
> Also, experts will evolve a workable process for any given project without needing to follow any particular Agile process to start with. That's one of the reasons they're experts.
True, but that ignores the people who aren't experts yet. They're the ones I care most about. And it ignores the substantial costs of learning all the important lessons yourself; it's often better not to reinvent the wheel.
> [..] teams within a large organisation [...]
Personally, despite 10 years of looking, I have never seen teams within a large organization successfully adopt what I would consider a serious Agile approach. I have seen a lot of large organizations adopt Agile jargon and get nothing out of it, though.
The problem is that Agile methods require a shift in power relations from top-down to bottom-up. Their approaches and values are basically antithetical to a lot of American business culture and MBA dogma. And successful exploitation requires deep change on the business side as well.
I think Agile failed for the same reason that Lean Manufacturing failed here: the important part wasn't the easily observed rituals, but the cultural differences. And the vast majority of the people who are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) would not accept deep cultural change.