Agile the reward, not the method

Some people failing following a diet says 'the diet does not work'. But most of them does not mean that if you follow the diet, they still does not loose weight. What they mean is that they cannot follow the diet.

Reading James Shore's excellent blog entry on the decline and fall of agile, I get the same feeling. When teams pick stuff from an agile methodology like scrum and call themselves a scrum team and it does not work they do not say "we couldn't follow the methodology" since it's easier to say the methodology does not work.

Here is a teaser (and perhaps now you see the parallells with diets):

These teams say they're Agile, but they're just planning (and replanning) frequently. Short cycles and the ability to re-plan are the benefit that Agile gives you. It's the reward, not the method. These psuedo-Agile teams are having dessert every night and skipping their vegetables. By leaving out all the other stuff--the stuff that's really Agile--they're setting themselves up for rotten teeth, an oversized waistline, and ultimate failure. They feel good now, but it won't last.

The blog entry is really recommended to you, thinking about going agile, or thinking about dropping agile.