But of course you wont. You will say "well they were doing Agile wrong" and you will have no evidence for that.
Curiously enough - I won't say that. I will point out that Agile is only just a bit over ten years old now, so a ten year £5billion agile project sounds... odd... to me. It certainly sounds atypical for projects in general.
But yes - agile projects fail. There is no system that will cause all projects to succeed. There is - as they say - no silver bullet. No argument from me there at all.
Let's forget the "agile" word for a bit.
How do I go about getting better at building software and building teams that make software?
Personally, I do things like:
* I look at research
* I look at successful teams I've worked on / observed and try out some of the things they do
* I look at failed teams and try and avoid doing some of the things they do
* I look at the stuff I try and see whether it works or not.
* I measure stuff - tweak what works, avoid what fails
* Repeat.
That kind of process, for me, has led me to a chunk of techniques that broadly sit under the lean/agile label. I'm not going off and going "yay agile". When I first encountered XP I was hugely sceptical - I really couldn't see how it could work effectively at all. But I tried some bits of it, and observed some other folk playing with other bits of it, and saw that it seemed to improve things, so tried some other stuff... and so on.
I'm not trying to say agile solves all problems. It's not a silver bullet. It's really freaking hard to impossible to use it in some contexts. But in the last ten years my personal experience it's helped me and my teams get better and building stuff. The experiences of a stack of people I've worked with who I respect, and the experiences of a stack of other people I've talked to and listened to and visited have been similar.
I'd like to think that we're not all complete idiots ;-)
So - if stuff fails I love to poke at it. When agile projects and when non-agile projects fail I poke and try and learn from it. Generally - I think I've got better at delivering stuff that makes my clients happy during my career. A stack of the skills that have helped me do that in the last ten years seem to have come from the agile community. Take from that what you will.
Curiously enough - I won't say that. I will point out that Agile is only just a bit over ten years old now, so a ten year £5billion agile project sounds... odd... to me. It certainly sounds atypical for projects in general.
But yes - agile projects fail. There is no system that will cause all projects to succeed. There is - as they say - no silver bullet. No argument from me there at all.
Let's forget the "agile" word for a bit.
How do I go about getting better at building software and building teams that make software?
Personally, I do things like:
* I look at research
* I look at successful teams I've worked on / observed and try out some of the things they do
* I look at failed teams and try and avoid doing some of the things they do
* I look at the stuff I try and see whether it works or not.
* I measure stuff - tweak what works, avoid what fails
* Repeat.
That kind of process, for me, has led me to a chunk of techniques that broadly sit under the lean/agile label. I'm not going off and going "yay agile". When I first encountered XP I was hugely sceptical - I really couldn't see how it could work effectively at all. But I tried some bits of it, and observed some other folk playing with other bits of it, and saw that it seemed to improve things, so tried some other stuff... and so on.
I'm not trying to say agile solves all problems. It's not a silver bullet. It's really freaking hard to impossible to use it in some contexts. But in the last ten years my personal experience it's helped me and my teams get better and building stuff. The experiences of a stack of people I've worked with who I respect, and the experiences of a stack of other people I've talked to and listened to and visited have been similar.
I'd like to think that we're not all complete idiots ;-)
So - if stuff fails I love to poke at it. When agile projects and when non-agile projects fail I poke and try and learn from it. Generally - I think I've got better at delivering stuff that makes my clients happy during my career. A stack of the skills that have helped me do that in the last ten years seem to have come from the agile community. Take from that what you will.