Maybe I was spectacularly unlucky, but in the last twenty or so years working with different companies and teams claiming to do agile, most were focused on the

Maybe I was spectacularly unlucky, but in the last twenty or so years working with different companies and teams claiming to do agile, most were focused on the motions and the tools (stand-ups and Jira) as opposed to the spirit and intention. Agile was and is nearly always used as an excuse to continue to make mid-sprint changes and push more work to the dev teams "because we are agile". An understanding of the level of support required at the leadership level and the accountability that follows is rarely understood. Interestingly over the past few years I am seeing more organizations migrate towards an iterative model with monthly cycles, and I've seen this work well with distributed teams with a wide range of roles (dev, UX, validation, tech pub, devops, etc.) In contrast, I also continue to see true scrum work extremely well with some teams. They are all relatively small (6-8ish) with strong support from the EVPs or C*Os, mostly operating from a single location or timezone, have a good rapport with each other and openness up the chain of command as well as horizontally with the stakeholders. That, to me has a large cultural component. Some teams can get there, and many won't.