The Agile Alliance is not All of The Agiles.
Thoughts on the PMI acquisition
(one announcement reads like a partnership, the other like an acquisition)
Lots of people are reacting to the Agile Alliance “Strategic Partnership” with the Project Management Institute (PMI), especially resurrecting the old “Agile is dead!” tropes.
A lot of people draw a false dichotomy between “Agile” and traditional “Project Management,” and the PMI is the favored boogieman of agilists the world over as the monolithic certifying body of PMP-carrying project managers.
The fact of that matter is that no agile framework or methodology ever completely displaced traditional project management. In actuality, the exact opposite has been happening for the last decade.
Look no further than the recent spates of mass layoffs. Companies like Capital One and Starbucks have been yeeting agile coaches and scrum masters for at least 8 years. When I worked at the hereditary oligarchy of Nordstrom, you weren’t permitted to say “The A Word” anywhere in the HQ after a typical an predictably failed effort to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for the (e)nterprise) the org there.
None of these organizations ever came close to achieving even a semblance of agility, not due to the many flaws of the frameworks or approaches but to the recalcitrant leadership, which demands mutually exclusive maximum governance and maximum speed. Of course, they require this with minimal accountability for executive leadership.
This is really where the PMI/PMPs shine. When you want maximum governance but wish to minimize leadership accountability, you build what’s called a ‘PMO’ or “Project Management Orifice” where an army of certified PMPs run around frantically trying to make people go faster and hit deadlines. They are the people who inject the scope for the unaccountable leaders.
They become the bottleneck of all decision-making as they yank people hither and yon, allocation them like “resources” ensuring that 15% of engineer Catherine is working on Projects A, D, F and R while her other 85% is shared across 19 absolution mission-critical initiatives. The Project Manager goes and tells people when the project has been scuttled and replaced by 9 other projects. They also absorb the blame when things predictably go wrong.
While these organizations I mentioned are throwing away all the people trying to strive for greater clarity (which comes dangerously close to looking like accountability for leadership) they’re doubling down on their PMOs. Project Manager roles ballooning as the cross-functional efficiency agilists hit the bricks.
Power is the one thing we’re never allowed to address in these efforts. Power has gravity, and it sucks everything into itself. In this “strategic partnership,” the Agile Alliance is not the black hole. Their acquisition allows the PMI to continue their branding efforts and be the source of all project management, Agile or otherwise.
It’s a smart move for the PMI and a survival move for the Agile Alliance. Like the great corporate consolidations we’re seeing, it’s a logical next step. When someone says “agile,” they can say, “Yeah, I’m agile; I have my PMP!”
Ultimately though, like Agile itself, this sucking in of the alliance isn’t going to have any meaningful impact on the world of work. Like all the agile initiatives that wound up being window-dressing on the battalions of project managers who are now relabeled “Agile Project Managers,” it’ll simply lend the veneer of change to the immovable status quo.
