I only put together the history of Agile and its original streams. It is not any “new version”. Senior agile experts know the history, as it was presented at conferences many times. And many of them have domain overlap, too. It is not then about how to help with agile in finance, but it is about how to bring finance closer to product development. If you would have a financial perspective, many decisions you take would be very different.
People who created the manifesto used the word Agile deliberately, they knew about the effort to modernize companies and about the label. IT-related people are in the organization to finance people often in a ratio of 500:1. Top management may be even 10.000:1 or more. Therefore it may look like it all comes from IT, but it is not.
I am not a fan of the word Agile Transformation anymore. It started with the idea of organizational change, but quickly degraded to implementing some framework only, mostly SAFe or “Spotify”, sometimes LeSS. You can also see, what type of people “lead” transformation. Fresh alumni of some agile certification course who often can't demonstrate any interest in organizational design, operations, or development. The root causes of stagnation in tech companies are overprocessing and bureaucracy. I am not convinced replacing a bad process with another one will improve something. I use the label creating Human Organization instead. I address mostly with Agile the cultural, strategic, and collaboration issues. The process is on the side as a supporting tool only.
I started to promote Agile here 15 years ago. We wanted to break the silos and bring people together. When people understand what other professions do and how they contribute to a product or service, information flow speeds up. Later however started new silo creation with subspecialized events like testing events, BA events, DevOps events, or Product events .… and many people forgot the need for broader T-shape knowledge.
To the examples. At my Agilia Conferences (e.g. www.agiliaconference.com) I brought examples. I did my best to verify if the speakers presented a story that indeed happened. There are many fakes at Agile conferences. I have seen more good examples outside of software development than inside. In my observation, best-managed organizations, do not use the word Agile at all. Neither they fall into the hype of agile transformation. They have their "our way" style, which uses many or all agile principles naturally. Performance depends on people. I saw many times that good managers quit and performance or agile structures just fell apart. A completely successful transformation I haven’t seen yet regardless of the mega industry that stands behind it. I have some good examples that crossed my path and I believe there are more out there. Graphisoft Park for their business model. Joyful Craftsmen, Actum, Prezi, Integral Vision, Semco for culture and leadership. Ferrari for innovation. Handelsbanken for customer service. Future Processing, Edenspiekerman for operations. Keep in mind, this relates to the time I visited them or I was there, today it can be different.
As for Spotify. I wanted to invite them to speak at the conference I guess in 2015. They were very enthusiastic and willing to send agile coaches to speak about their “framework”. At that time, they were in an industry of burning investors’ money. I asked them instead to prepare a presentation, ideally presented by developers, to speak about how their life as developers has changed or improved with the agile way of work and due to all those “big agile names” around them. And how it impacted the business. They rejected. Then I spoke with people from Spotify or who came across the company. It lead me to the conclusion that it is a vertical bureaucracy like any other and agile is being used in engineering only, most probably not 100%. So yes, too much hype and myths around.
