8 Agile UNfriendly Scenarios

By Bachan Anand / Filed under WORK is GOOD / November 24th, 2010

It seems Agile is everywhere: haunting my Twitter feed, invading LinkedIn, creeping into all my favorite blogs. However, Agile is NOT for everyone. While perusing LinkedIn, I stumbled upon a few lively discussions debating when Agile is or is not appropriate. What did I take away? Read on.

Don’t use Agile if…

You hate delivering value but love spending money.
You despise customer involvement and early feedback.
Collaboration nauseates you. Who wants to see her team self organize around a challenge and maximize potential? Sickening.
Understanding of the overall system and/or product vision is only intended for an elite few in your organization. (This one is especially important if you are a subject matter expert and love being allocated to bazillions of projects and gazillions of teams.)
Change requests are your guilty pleasure and you dream of contract re-negotiations. This rule also applies if customers are your worst nightmare.
Your QA team only likes to find bugs (and lots of them) hours before production.
You are of the strong belief User Acceptance Testing should be saved until the most irresponsible moment (again, try a few hours before production).
The developers in your company favor creating the most technical solution rather than the solution of most value for the customer.

What is Agile, anyway? Is it just an annoying buzz word for new age geeks (the kind that embrace principles and values over static practices). How did it ever become so popular? Doesn’t it only applies to the very small number of projects with fuzzy or changing requirements? Isn’t the worst part the way Agile fosters a collaborative environment AND ongoing communication with customers? Waterfall gods save us!