Re: Much (most?) of Watson Health wasn't "Watson"
Agile isn't the problem. Pretending you're doing agile without actually executing by those rules is. Mixing agile and waterfall leads to drowning in red tape.
You can have defined goals and do agile; you just need to be willing to change your path to those goals quickly, and to show (and demand) incremental progress en route. And, if necessary, to fail fast, accept that, and see if there's another good use for what you've invested so far or if it should be written off, shelved for possible later use, and the resources should be moved to a new goal.
I've seen good Agile, though we didn't give it that name, or any name, and maybe that's why it worked. Agile done properly reduces to "tell folks the direction you want to go in, encourage teamwork, help them set intermediate goals but otherwise get out of their way". Scrum and the other "here's how to do Agile" writeups can come close to that, but are already excessive formalism to reassure managers that they can still Manage and to give the bean-counters something to count And that's when they are executed as designed rather than letting the process become a drag in productivity.
Agile wasn't the problem. Not being agile enough might have been part of it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
