They bought in to simple Agile practices, like Scrum, but never to the underlying principles. It’s not the “What”, but more about the “Why”. You don’t “Do” Agile, you “Are” Agile.

I see little evidence many large enterprises can comfortably cope with the continuous improvement model at the core of Agile & Lean thinking. They want processes & procedures that they can follow, often blindly. Hence the traditional waterfall Project based mentality that has served, for better or worse, for the last 50years.

The danger I see is many large organisations will seek to outsource their IT functions, simply because they don’t want to make that internal culture change. They want the agility but don’t want to be Agile. So they’ll try to ship out all the messy bits to an external supplier. The jury’s out whether they will be savvy enough to draft suitably “Agile” contracts or if they will revert to traditional fixed price project based contracts as before.

I’ve tried not to use the word agile in every company where I’ve implemented agile techniques since then and it works much better. I think this is because no one understands what becoming agile means until they’ve succeeded in implementing a number of agile techniques themselves.

My preferred way of working is to implement a technique, prove that it works, gain some trust, implement another technique and so on.