From a close outsider's perspective: I am by no means a fan of agile as a 'religion' and in my role on the edge of the Dev world (Technical Delivery), I have s

From a close outsider's perspective: I am by no means a fan of agile as a 'religion' and in my role on the edge of the Dev world (Technical Delivery), I have seen many teams try to take the book of agile and implement it end-end, which focuses them more on the mechanisms than the 'doing'. Agile has some good common sense strategies for (to use other phrases) common ways of working, problem triage, workload assessment, resourcing, progress tracking and measuring success but it's often deployed 'big bang' when (like ITIL), an *overseen* progressive change management exercise would be less of a shock to all concerned. I stress 'overseen', because when you just dump the processes and tools on a team you often get situations where, for example, the sprint backlog just becomes a dumping ground for everything in progress and everything yet to be scheduled - with the icing on the cake (in one recent encounter) being that the backlog is exported into a spreadsheet for prioritisation and then collaborative updates to this are used to edit comments in the user stories! I don't mind if agile is 'killed' because a lot of the common sense it conveys is either already being used (in perhaps a less-than-ideal joined up way) or can be used under a different brand name. Mind you, some organisations that have made their bread and butter from the concept might have something to say about this! The overall aim should be for any team to work in a known and consistent way to meet their deliverables. Call it agile, call it foo; whatever!