Building on a movement led by engineers

It's interesting to me that the concepts of Agile, in its earliest days, were developed and promoted primarily by software engineers. That was not by accident as software programmers were taking the brunt of the criticism for the failures created by implementations of the traditional software development model.

Being in the trenches, so to speak, many software engineers understood the root cause of the failures of the traditional model. Through experimentation, those engineers discovered new ways of working that overcame the limitations of the traditional model. In the process, they also discovered better ways to work together as a team in collaborative, safe, and respectful environments.

However, and this is not meant to be a denigrating statement, in most but not all cases they were software engineers and consultants, and not organizational executives. That very fact limited the scope of the implementations they could take on without senior management support. Their early experiments involved single products with one or a small handful of development teams.

For sure, agile-based practices showed demonstrable successes early on, bringing positive attention. Eventually, senior management caught on and began to realize that there might be something to this whole agile idea. Senior executives are ultimately pragmatic. They have a fiduciary responsibility to stockholders to implement organizational structures that are highly profitable and support the mission of the enterprise. From that perspective, there is much incentive to adopt agile-based practices.

On the other hand, there weren't many examples of large-scale agile-based implementation programs or projects. Scaled agile approaches evolved over time, but not without a lot of fits and starts. The issues with scaling agile were not so much related to the maturation of technologies or methodologies, but rather rethinking organizational designs. I'm going to table this discussion for now. But we will revisit organizational design issues in Section 2 of this book.