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A blooming industry of services helping consultancy firms fake Agile expertise

For the reasons below, it is important for our community and our industry to have a frank and open conversation on these topics.

In the last two years:

  • I’ve been offered Agile content ghost writing for my company blog
  • I’ve been asked or offered to be paid for liking, referencing and/or endorsing flawed Agile content from consultancy companies with clearly no Agile expertise
  • I’ve heard from multiple sources about unknown “Agile” conferences that offers paid speaking slots for consultants and consultancy firms that want to buy credibility
  • I’ve heard from multiple sources of paid support offered to candidates while taking Agile ceritfications exams to ensure they pass. And I’ve seen super discounted Agile training that promise to pass the certification exam

Now, these are bad pennies, like the cheap counterfeit Ray-ban sold on the sidewalk of a street market.
But they are born from the (luckily now declining) market success of other more polished imitations such as:

  • SAFe certification & accreditation pyramid schemes.
  • SAFe 1-size-fits-all all-inclusive consulting selling framework
  • and similar made-up recipes created by some of the big consultancy firms

.. while those that are fluent in Agile know that Agile is about the learnings made during the journey of gradually growing the organisation’s own ways of working internally, with help from some guiding principle, an incomplete starting point, and inspirations from a set of known patterns & practices leading to other novel practices.

Have you seen some of these bad pennies too?


Interact and re-share:
– The original post on Linked-In: click here

See also:
The State of Agile Software, Martin Fowler
Recipes vs Chefs, video clip

You may also be interested in these community created guides:
– Executive summary for everyone considering investing in Agile: https://bit.ly/AgileInvestingExecutiveSummary
– Information for decision-makers considering the SAFe framework: https://bit.ly/SAFe4DecisionMakers
– Information for decision-makers considering large consultancy firms’ Agile offering: https://bit.ly/agileOffering4DecisionMakers


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