Agile is Integral but Insufficient.
While agile approaches are effective for managing today’s complex projects, they will not ensure your project or product is successful. I have seen many agile projects fail despite correctly using agile approaches and being staffed with smart, motivated teams.
This was especially disconcerting for me since I have been deeply involved in the development and promotion of agile approaches for much of my career. (I helped create DSDM in 1994, served on the board of the Agile Alliance, Agile Leadership Network and held other high profile agile roles, along with using agile approaches for 25 years.)
I have however, also been fortunate to work on many successful projects and with some award-winning teams and have come to realize they all use agile alongside other strategies and approaches; sometimes at the forefront, but often in the background.
This is obvious once you see it, but rarely is it discussed or supported by models or literature. Successful teams use a savvy combination of agile, leadership, domain-specific skills and traditional approaches where they make sense.
I believe the future is to explain and provide tools to help navigate this mix of approaches and choose the best combination for the endeavor at hand. Knowledge is weightless whereas processes and ceremonies come with a burden of execution, so we need to choose wisely which approaches we adopt and continue learning from a diverse spectrum of knowledge.
The Beyond Agile Model aims to show how we can determine the optimal mix of agile and other approaches to use. It provides tools, such as ranking a project on attributes
It also describes the ongoing need to focus on value delivery and pruning process when it no longer justifies its time commitment. It is a dynamic process
See the How To Use page for instructions on how to use the model.