Agile works - if you let it...
Having just completed the first phase of an Agile project we were in a unique position to rate our progress against a rival team working on a system with exactly the same functionality as ours.
A team of three and a half people completed the full system for the September deadline where as our opponents with a team of 15 people were hoping to go live at the end of October.
It can't be that the three of us who were full-time on the project were faster and brighter than 5 each of our opponents (although it would be nice to think it was.)
It has to be that the speed and flexibility of regular scrums, 2 week sprints, and constant UAT really accelerated the development - it certainly felt like it did. There was also the good feeling that when the final UAT sign-off came you'd not have that call saying "this isn't what we wanted".
The key part was total buy-in from all the parties concerned, us in engineering were keen to give a proper agile project a fair crack, the junior members of the business team were excited by the possibility of the hand's on approach, and their seniors were nervous, but trusted everyone to do their best in a very short time scale.
But will it scale... For a team of 500 there's no chance, the sheer amount of "work stuff" that mires a large project will bog a team of 500 - but if you're controlling a workforce of that size you're certainly not thinking in an Agile way. It would need a strong re-grouping exercise to identify the key points and responsibilities. The reality of the project was that we were working in an Agile way while the people delivering the services we were using could have been working in a completely structured manner.
So I'd suggest that you don't have to attempt to scale the agile approach, as you are best served in some areas (such as the foundation APIs and critical services) to maintain a solid reliable and quality tested platform, but in other areas notably those which are closest to the business and the users Agility will pay dividends and the entire project will benefit from the positive results it brings.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
