“I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it . . . Scrum is a very simple framework within which the “game” of complex product development is played. Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization’s product and system development practices. The intention of Scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them.”

This was Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum. 10 years ago.
Ten years after, things did not get a lot better for big corporations that were born with leaders used to waterfall.

I agree with almost everything in this article and I completely agree with what Tootie wrote above: "The fundamental problem that drives most agile failures isn't in the team's execution, it's in the business' expectations. One side is signed up for incremental delivery, and one side is set up for a fixed scope and deadline and the result is misery."

As the article rightly noticed being Agile is not just building faster. It is delivering "value faster". That also means: "do not build what does not need to be built" and every 2 weeks be willing to scratch what you have worked on. Instead in most of the big companies the business people present shiny objects to the leadership and their goals is to build those shiny objects. Nobody wants to say: "We were wrong". The result is a few projects were people worked for 1 year and then the project is abandon. Even if the idea was good, nobody wants to work on little improvements.

It seems that Agile, Scrum, and most of classic agile lingo have a bad connotation for most of the people in these days. Some (over) simplifications that were made to make Agile easier to adopt ended up making things worse.

People in big corporations are used to the "flavor of the month" Most of the people really do not look for a revolutions there. They are just looking to how they can seem smart to impress their bosses and being promoted. That how Scrum got in. And that is why it will never realize its full potential there. They do not want to change how they think and how they do things.

I run a pretty successful team inside a bigger organization. I wanted to use story points. Start from scratch and have the team get a sense for what 1 point is. And my boss really wanted us to use story points. He only had one requirement we had to use this equation 1 story point = 1/2 day of work...

Trying to explain him that one of the reason you use story points in the first place is to stay away from time did not go anywhere. All the other teams were using that equation and we could not be the only team that was not to using it.

Frankly speaking, I think it is hard to work at the "inter-team" level if you cannot use the same unit. That's why in Agile you want truly autonomous teams. But big organization were not organized in that way. So you need to re-organize the company in a different way... but assuming there is the desire, who is going to drive that change? Who is going to take the risk of changing something that work in some way in a way that is not going to work too well for a few months?

In my humble opinion, it is almost impossible to change an existing a waterfall organization and make Agile work inside of it. Only a leader with a lot of trust by everybody in the company and a lot of courage may be able to make it work.

Most of the people that hate Scrum, Kanban or other flavor of Agile had experience with a "Cargo Cult" Agile preached in big companies and usually end up thinking that Agile is sooo screwed up. A big corporation will usually embrace embracing some things that usually really help (ex: standup meetings) and change a ton of other things that will make things worse.

You like the Agile mindset, you are going to be a lot more successful if you start from scratch with new young people or people that really want to commit to make things great.

For a new organization is easy to start with a simple "Agile template" and make sure that the team is really onboard with a continuous improvement mindset. Keeping regular retrospectives will make things evolve quickly in the right way.