When Agile Is No Longer Needed

Many organizations are starting to hesitate to go full steam on the Agile transformation. Some of them are getting rid of Scrum Masters, some are incorporating their responsibilities into more comprehensive project and product management roles, and some are reverting to control - introducing some misleading frameworks that somehow have been designed to embrace and promote the same principles, but in reality, just another opportunity for senior leadership to micromanage what is going on inside the organization.

So, what’s going on with Agile? Do we don’t need it anymore? And have we ever needed it truly?

I am invested in the topic. For over five years, my career has been closely related to the transformation of organizations, and both Agile Manifesto and Scrum Guides have been my closest friends. However, as a person who has embraced the rules and empowered teams to get involved as much as possible, I am more than interested in eliminating my role. This is not about the job security.

As far as I am concerned, I can find something else to do - this is about the values. I know this might sound like I am trying to show off, but I genuinely believe that the best results can only be achieved if the organization and its people are 100% committed to following key pillars and values.

Some organizations have decided that Agile does not work for them. They do not have enough information from the products and teams, so they introduce additional controls and revert to what they did 20 years ago. But is Agile truly about not having controls?

Of course not. They are trying to do the factory reset and return to where they have started; most likely because they have given up too early. They have never actually started to collect the benefits and just decided to wipe out all the results and thousands of hours of effort they have been implementing to get to that state of agility.

Where the Benefits Kick In

The problem here is we don’t talk enough about the real benefits of agile. We all know it helps deliver as much value as possible with little money and time, but how does it look? Barely anyone talks about actual results, the change in customer satisfaction, DORA metrics, and other real numbers valid for the specific organization at a particular time.

When most companies start their transformation, they are not trying to reach long-term goals. They do not establish what will be the change to their critical metrics past some time and who will be the central receiver of the benefit.

Is it too late to start talking about it when you and your leadership are already in a meeting and discussing scrapping your initiatives and getting back to the controls you had before you even started? It depends on why you have decided to scrap all of it.

There are still some situations when you can go with one extended-release and hope that everything goes as planned, or, as someone would say, a waterfall. This would be something straightforward, something you see every day—let's say, a marketplace or a landing page.  But the truth is that most of the work we are doing today, especially with the fast adoption of AI, has never been done before. Of course, even if it was done before, we need experts to talk to, so we operate in a complex domain.

You, of course, can try to go back, but the actual thing that we all have to remember is that Agile is not about roles, rules, or events. It is about people, their behavior, and values. No matter what’s going on with the project, do not reverse these, and you will get closer to success with any methodology you use in your organization.