What I suspected for a long time will happen just did: PMI has announced its agile certificate. This is a significant development for many reasons.

First of all it officially confirms agile’s position amongst respected management methods – as part of the mainstream. I wrote about it at length recently, so I’ll just point out here that PMI’s move spells the end of the “agile revolution” in one sense. Just like the Linux revolution before it agile came with a promise of radically reshaping the workplace. It will in some places, but overall (and just like Linux) it will not completely eradicate its older alternatives, but rather become one of them – another respectable, mature tool for managing projects/teams.
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With 2010 ending soon it is a good moment to think about the future of agile. First – lets define it: agile is a set of principles, methods and practices that emphasise short turnaround times, high flexibility (also as a way of dealing with risk through adaptation), focus on quality and teams. Agile has been around for a decade now and it is now widely known and accepted – long gone are days when barely anyone knew about it.

With agile now mainstream it is clearly loosing its initial momentum and freshnes. While many would object I think this is a sign of maturity. Agile as a phenomenon merely follows a natural path of methods/approaches from new to commonplace. With that its position changes. From a separate specialty driven by a few “gurus” and a crowd of active followers (and consultants) it is now becoming a part of every good manager’s methods&approaches portfolio. From something that few people specialized in agile will now be transitioning into something everyone must know to a degree appropriate for their seniority and specialty.

This is good news, because it means the agile movement has succeeded in changing the industry – even if it means that I can envision agile practices becoming part of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) in three to four years. This is the book despised by many agilists (most of whom probably didn’t even read it) yet agile’s inclusion there will be a sign of its success – and an end to an era.

In hope that in the near future there will be much less need for dogmatic “agile coaches” and much more for good pragmatic managers, who will be able to use and apply both agile and traditional project management methods – as well as manage the operational, financial and human part of their businesses/units/teams. Key here is to use methods, tools and tricks that are appropriate to get things done – as opposed to trying to squeeze every situation to fit a method one happens to know best. Dogmatism that I crticized in my last post doesn’t help here.

1. Dogmatism

Agile is about adaptive, creative approach to complex work yet amazingly average agilists are the most dogmatic people I know. If you read their blogs and follow their tweets you will soon see dogmas being proclaimed and anathemas being cast on heretics who don’t agree.

The irony is that those dogmas can be pretty obvious observations, just repackaged to look like great discoveries. A good example I’ve seen on Twitter recently: “If you haven’t met you are not a team”. Well, that’s pretty obvious that it is much harder for team cohesion to occur when people don’t meet – it has been known for years that colocated teams are more productive than dispersed teams. However, to say that such a team can’t be a team and can’t do anything meaningful is turning an insight into a dogma.
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Almost three years ago at the Agile Development Practices conference Mary Poppendieck took the stage and announced to the assembled agilists that Agile has become mainstream. It was met with applause.

This moment reflects very well the mood of those involved in the agile movement back then. Everyone was sure that agile approach and practices will now take the industry by storm and reshape the way we work on software projects. For some time it indeed looked like Scrum, XP and other less known practices and methodologies will replace the dreaded waterfall and the poor quality it consistently delivered in software. Alas, three years later it is clear that even though almost everyone now claims to be ‘agile’ not everything turned out so great. In fact, it turned out that implementing Agile in teams is very hard and in large companies with many teams even harder. There were many success stories – but an also a great number of (mostly untold) stories of agile failing to deliver its promises. Clearly, Agile was working as expected only in some places.
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