"Agility without a framework for saying no is not flexibility: it is a blank check for operational chaos."
The illusion of "waterfall dressed up as Agile"
On an 18-month strategic program, Agile was presented as the engine of innovation. In reality, the business kept adding new features while flatly refusing to give up anything from the initial scope.
Agile in name only. Scrum vocabulary (dailies, sprints, backlog) without any scope flexibility.
Hidden tunnel effect. Iterations on paper, but zero real production releases before month 14.
Team burnout. The technical team was told to absorb continuous additions with no change to budget or schedule.
The 4 symptoms of weak governance
- Refusing the trade-off (iron triangle). Fixing cost, time and scope simultaneously while demanding agility on changes.
- Advisory-only decision committees. Steering bodies that keep postponing hard or unpopular decisions.
- Product Owners without decision rights. POs reduced to messengers, forced to escalate every decision to the executive committee.
- Accumulating architecture debt. Prioritizing flashy demos over the robustness and security of the platform.
"We're Agile, so we can add these features to the next sprint without touching the deadline or the budget."
Over to you: is your agility real or cosmetic?
The series "IT & AI: the reality on the ground"
Why 70% of IT projects driftEpisode 2
Generative AI and IT budgets: the "divided by 4" illusionEpisode 3
The "Fake Agile" trap and weak governanceEpisode 4
The POC syndrome: why 80% of AI projects failEpisode 5
The new execution contract: governance, capabilities and P&L
Program Management & Recovery
Executive steering of complex programs, PMO, recovery of troubled IT projects and IS modernization.
Fakhri Essedik
Founder of EDX Advisory
For more than 25 years, Fakhri Essedik has helped executive teams and CIOs steer major Digital, Data & AI programs across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.