Most firms have no clue about ‘Agile’.
There is the theatre.
- Teams hold daily stand-ups. Project managers rebrand as Scrum Masters. Work items transform into “user stories” tracked on digital boards. Yet beneath this surface-level terminology, nothing fundamental changes about how work gets planned, prioritised, or delivered.
- The Stack magazine describes this phenomenon as deploying “performative Agile branding… without making any fundamental changes to how projects are managed” (The Stack, 2022). Teams go through prescribed motions while remaining trapped in traditional power structures and delivery expectations. This creates the illusion of transformation without its substance.
Why does this theatrical approach persist?
Often because organisational leaders demand “Agile transformation” without understanding what that truly entails.
The visible artefacts — ceremonies, boards, revised titles — provide easy evidence of change. The challenging aspects — decentralised decision-making, comfort with uncertainty, true team empowerment — require deeper cultural shifts that many leaders hesitate to embrace. As Deloitte consultants observed with striking clarity: “staging ‘agile theatre’ is simple, making it work is hard” (Celi et al., 2021).
The consequences appear in team morale and effectiveness. “Zombie Scrum” emerges when teams mechanically perform rituals without connecting to Agile’s purpose. No genuine customer feedback shapes priorities. Product Owners function as requirement scribes rather than value maximisers.
- Velocity becomes the goal instead of delivering impact (Firlit, 2020).
Without true empowerment and leadership support, enthusiasm dies while the ceremonies shamble on — a perfect metaphor for initiative without essence.
The Scaling Paradox
When organisations recognise the need to coordinate multiple Agile teams, many turn to scaling frameworks — especially the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), used by 37% of Agile organisations (The Stack, 2022).
- Ironically, these frameworks often resurrect the very bureaucracy Agile sought to eliminate.
SAFe introduces layers of coordination (Team, Program, Large Solution, Portfolio) that can quickly recreate traditional hierarchies under new names. As one practitioner quoted in The Stack observed, SAFe is frequently “imposed top-down, in a hierarchical way — something which goes against the precepts of Agile” (The Stack, 2022). Teams find themselves spending more time managing the framework than delivering value to customers.
- Tom Geraghty’s critique cuts to the heart of the matter: “SAFe encourages top-down, large-batch planning rather than small, iterative feedback loops… SAFe is not Agile” (Geraghty, n.d.). While SAFe incorporates Agile terminology, its implementation often prioritises predictability and coordination over autonomy and adaptability.
The framework appeals precisely because it offers the comfort of structure to organisations uncomfortable with Agile’s inherent ambiguity.
Leaders seek the supposed benefits of Agile without surrendering control. The result becomes “Waterfall with new labels” — departments renamed as “value streams,” project phases rebranded as “program increments,” yet still fundamentally driven by predetermined plans rather than emergent customer needs.
The Operations Chasm
Agile development produces potentially shippable code every sprint. But what happens when operations remains rooted in traditional, risk-averse deployment approaches?
- Value sits unrealised while code waits weeks or months for deployment windows.
Forrester identified this pattern clearly: development teams may adopt Scrum while “release management and operations stick to traditional methods,” completing the “Fall” portion of “Water-Scrum-Fall” (Forrester Research, 2011). This disconnect creates growing frustration as development velocity increases without corresponding improvements in delivery speed.
This DevOps gap manifests through manual processes, organisational silos, and broken feedback loops. Without automated testing and deployment pipelines, operations becomes a bottleneck that no amount of development agility can overcome. When Development and Operations operate as separate departments with conflicting incentives — one rewarded for feature delivery, the other for system stability — collaboration breaks down at the precise interface where it matters most.
- Perhaps most damagingly, infrequent deployments delay essential feedback from actual users.
Teams cannot truly inspect and adapt based on outcomes when those outcomes remain theoretical rather than observed. Research confirms the significance of this integration: organisations implementing both Agile and DevOps were twice as likely to achieve desired outcomes than those implementing Agile alone (Accelerate: State of DevOps Report, 2019).
Metric Madness
How organisations measure Agile success often undermines the very benefits they seek.
- Velocity — intended as a team capacity planning tool — becomes transformed into a productivity metric. Story points — designed for relative sizing — get misused as contractual commitments or cost calculations.
When management treats velocity as a performance indicator, teams respond predictably by gaming the system. They inflate estimates or prioritise easy stories over valuable ones. As one Agile coach warned, “When Velocity is used for anything other than capacity planning, velocity becomes the most dangerous agile metric” (Balegar, n.d.).
Even more fundamentally, organisations fixate on output metrics (features completed, story points delivered) rather than outcome metrics (customer satisfaction, business results). Scrum.org observed this pattern in struggling organisations that “focus on velocity, story points, outputs delivery instead of delivering a potentially releasable increment and customer satisfaction” (Firlit, 2020).
- This metric distortion creates a pernicious cycle.
Teams abandon technical excellence and innovation — both temporarily “inefficient” in pure velocity terms — to chase arbitrary numeric targets. Management sees rising velocity and concludes Agile is working, even as technical debt accumulates and customer value stagnates. The organisation optimises what it can measure rather than what actually matters.
In sum, Agile has lost its intent and meaning. Most firms are lost in the Agile forest, without a clue or a path.