Agile

The Agile Political Landscape Series: ICAgile and the Left-Leaning Independents

/ Craig Smith / 1 Comment

Please note: This is article 7 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

  1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
  2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
  3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
  4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
  5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents
  6. The Agile Political Landscape Series: Kanban and the Australian Democrats

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum has its left-leaning independents. Not career politicians shaped by party preselection and factional compromise, but people who arrive carrying genuine depth in a field, a clear set of values, and a conviction that none of the available options adequately represent what they believe. They don’t offer a party platform. They offer a proposition based on principles and evidence, choosing policies that best fit the community they serve.

In the agile world, the certification that best represents the left-leaning independent is ICAgile.

Now before we go too deeply, Daniel and I should acknowledge our relationship with respect to ICAgile. We both have a long association with the certification as founding partners and have dedicated much of our careers to what this certification set out to achieve. We have done our best to apply the same honesty here that we have brought to the rest of the series, but some bias might prevail.

The International Consortium for Agile was founded in 2010 by Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D and Alistair Cockburn, an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto. Their founding proposition was radical for its time: agile is not a process, a methodology, or a framework. It is a mindset, described by four values, defined by twelve principles, and manifested through an unlimited number of practices. ICAgile was the first certification body to build its entire certification architecture around this approach. It was designed explicitly to strip away any prescriptive approaches and invite participants to adopt agile in their context. ICAgile is the “choose your own adventure” story in the spectrum.

So who is ICAgile’s political counterpart?

As our values-driven and deliberately non-prescriptive agile certification, ICAgile maps to left-leaning independents, the credible crossbenchers who sit outside the major party structures, have deep expertise in their chosen discipline, and win on the strength of their knowledge and principles.

The parallels are immediate. Left-leaning independents don’t run on a party platform because a platform implies a fixed position regardless of context. Instead, they review the options, apply their expertise, and make policy decisions based on what their community actually needs. ICAgile works the same way. It accredited learning experiences against outcomes developed by thought leaders, and trusted facilitators to review the available approaches, apply their own expertise, and choose the practices that best suited their learners. Neither is making a bet on a single system. Both are making a bet on the quality of the judgement in the room.

Left-leaning independents also attract people of genuine substance. What draws them is rarely ambition for power, it is frustration that the existing options are failing the people they care about. Their constituents are not just voters; they are the community they have spent their professional lives serving. ICAgile attracted the same calibre of contributor. The thought leaders who built its learning tracks, Craig among them, brought genuine field experience to what they created. These were not theorists writing curriculum. They were practitioners who had lived the problems the learning was designed to address, and that credibility showed in the quality of what the best facilitators delivered.

One of the most compelling qualities of the left-leaning independent is the breadth of community they can serve. Unconstrained by party ideology, they are free to work across the aisle, drawing on whatever evidence and expertise the situation demands. Their values are progressive, but their reach is not limited to the left. ICAgile operates the same way. Grounded in a progressive, mindset-first philosophy, its certification was never the exclusive territory of product-led organisations or transformation advocates. Practitioners working in heavily governed, project-based environments found ICAgile equally valuable, because values and principles are transferable regardless of context. A conservative organisation and a progressive one can both benefit from genuine agile understanding. The method they choose to apply it through is simply a different chapter of the same adventure.

There is a challenge that comes with being an independent that party politicians rarely face in the same way. Without a machine behind them, left-leaning independents can spread themselves across too many issues, developing a view on everything and a focused mandate on nothing. The community expects breadth, but the work demands focus. ICAgile faced an equivalent tension. The curriculum expanded steadily across the years, reaching into coaching, leadership, product ownership, DevOps, and business agility, each addition driven by genuine expertise and real demand. But breadth created a maintenance problem. Learning outcomes that had been developed by some of the finest practitioners in the field began to age, and the pace of updates did not match the pace at which the discipline was moving. What had once felt current started to feel like it was describing a conversation from several years earlier. There was also a structural constraint that compounded this: every certification had to fit within a deliverable of two or more days to qualify, which worked well for standalone learning but became a genuine hindrance when organisations needed bespoke, modular transformation programs that didn’t map neatly to that format. The architecture that had once been liberating had quietly become a limitation.

For practitioners, ICAgile’s foundational certification remains one of the most intellectually honest starting points in the market. It grounds people in the thinking behind agility rather than the mechanics of performing it. Because the learning is anchored in values and principles rather than prescribed practices, it has an inherent flexibility that method-specific certifications simply cannot offer. Practitioners are not taught one way to do something. They are equipped to think about why agility works, which means the application of that learning can evolve as the field evolves, as their organisation matures, and as their context demands. For organisations, understand what you are investing in: practitioners who can think, adapt, and choose the right approach for their context, rather than practitioners who can only perform a prescribed one.

Left-leaning independents rarely form government. Their value is not in the machinery of power but in the quality of thinking they bring to the room, and in their willingness to hold a position on principle when the major parties are playing politics. ICAgile’s most enduring contribution is exactly that: it said, early and clearly, that agile is a mindset and that the values and principles that define it can be applied in any context, through any practice, by any team willing to genuinely understand them. No method required. No platform necessary. Just the conviction that the right answer should follow the evidence and the context, not the other way around.

The Agile Political Landscape Series: Kanban and the Australian Democrats

/ Craig Smith / 2 Comments

Please note: This is article 6 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

  1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
  2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
  3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
  4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
  5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum has its quietly effective parties. Not the idealists demanding systemic overhaul. Not the establishment parties jostling for the centre. But the movements that do serious, disciplined work, build a loyal following, and somehow never quite break through to the mainstream because a louder, more charismatic neighbour took all the air out of the room.

In the agile certification world, that party is Kanban.

Ask most practitioners if they ‘use Kanban’ and a majority will say yes. Ask them whether they actively limit work in progress, track flow metrics, use service level expectations, or practice evolutionary change discipline and the numbers drop sharply.

David J. Anderson, who pioneered the Kanban Method for knowledge work, has himself declared “Kanban is ubiquitous, it’s time to declare victory.” And in one sense, he’s right. Kanban boards are everywhere however the Kanban Method is far less common than you might think. That gap, between widespread adoption of the surface and shallow understanding of the substance, is precisely what makes Kanban one of the most underappreciated certifications on our Agile Political Spectrum.

Kanban’s roots stretch back to post-war Japan and the Toyota Production System, not as ideology, but as operational discipline. The original Kanban was a signalling card used to trigger replenishment in a pull-based production line. No manifesto. No cultural revolution. A control mechanism designed to reduce inventory risk and improve flow.

When Anderson introduced the Kanban Method to knowledge work in the mid-2000s, he was deliberate about what it was and wasn’t. He made the positioning explicit from the outset: start with what you do now, respect current roles and responsibilities, and pursue incremental, evolutionary improvement.

Kanban does not require new roles, it does not demand reorganisation or assume that hierarchy must be dismantled. Instead, it asks organisations to visualise their work, limit work in progress, measure flow, manage risk, and improve gradually over time. This is not structural reform. It is structural preservation combined with operational discipline.

Over time, Kanban matured into a serious professional discipline. Kanban University formalised the certification pathway, building a rigorous body of knowledge around flow metrics, service-level expectations, probabilistic forecasting, and the Kanban Maturity Model. The emphasis was never on ceremonies or team rituals. It was on service delivery systems and organisational capability.

So who is Kanban’s political counterpart?

As our right-of-centre, disciplined, and chronically underrated agile certification, Kanban maps to the Australian Democrats.

The Australian Democrats were a centrist party founded in 1977, best known for holding the balance of power in the Senate and their rallying cry: “keeping the bastards honest.” At their peak they wielded influence well beyond their vote share, doing serious legislative work while louder voices on both sides dominated the headlines.

The parallels with Kanban are immediate and striking.

Both built serious, rigorous bodies of knowledge and operated with genuine discipline. Both accumulated loyal, knowledgeable followings that punched above their weight in terms of real-world influence. And both were ultimately drowned out, not because their ideas were wrong, but because a louder movement captured the room.

Against the noise of certification ecosystems that scaled aggressively through the 2000s and 2010s, Kanban University’s comparatively modest global network barely registers. And yet, in organisations that genuinely implement it, the Kanban Method consistently delivers improved flow, reduced risk, greater predictability, and a cleaner picture of organisational capacity.

The Democrats were never trying to win government. They were trying to make the system work better. Kanban was never trying to replace whatever else was in the room. It was trying to improve how work flows through whatever system already exists. Both found meaningful influence in that role. Neither got the recognition their contribution deserved.

Kanban boards have become so ubiquitous that many practitioners genuinely believe they are “doing Kanban” simply by moving cards across columns in a tool or on a physical whiteboard. Far fewer implement WIP limits with discipline. Fewer still track cycle time, use probabilistic forecasting, or develop capability in flow analytics. The Kanban Maturity Model, one of the more thoughtful frameworks for understanding organisational development in the agile world, is largely unknown outside the Kanban community itself.

This creates a peculiar market dynamic. Kanban suffers not from bad press, but from misrepresentation by familiarity. Nobody declares Kanban adoption a failure. They just assume they’re already doing it. The certification therefore struggles to communicate its genuine depth to a market that thinks it already knows what Kanban is.

The agile world generated years of passionate debate, consultant wars, and certification inflation around louder frameworks, which paradoxically gave them more visibility. Kanban slipped in the back door, got implemented on whiteboards everywhere, and then got largely forgotten as a serious discipline.

Kanban sits on the right-conservative side of our Agile Political Spectrum, but in a particular way. It is not conservative because it adds bureaucracy or resists change. It is conservative because it genuinely respects existing structures and pursues improvement within them rather than demanding their replacement.

This makes Kanban valuable in a range of contexts that more progressive certifications struggle to serve. For teams operating in complex, highly regulated, or politically sensitive environments where structural redesign is simply not on the table, Kanban offers a credible, evidence-based path to improvement. For leaders who need to demonstrate results without triggering a governance revolt, Kanban’s language of flow, throughput, and risk is far more accessible than the vocabulary of transformation.

For organisations genuinely committed to a product operating model and cultural transformation, Kanban may feel insufficient on its own, though it often becomes essential as a delivery discipline within that broader journey. The ability to visualise and manage flow doesn’t become less important once you’ve reorganised around products. It becomes more important.

If you are an organisation wondering whether Kanban ‘counts’ as agile, or whether it’s just a board tool, the answer is that the board is the least interesting part. The discipline underneath it is where the value lives.

The Australian Democrats may no longer exist as a political party. Their legacy, however, is woven into the fabric of Australian legislative history in ways that rarely get acknowledged. Kanban risks a similar fate, its ideas absorbed into every tool and methodology without credit, its depth largely undiscovered.

Like a good Democrats senator, Kanban won’t promise you a revolution. But it will make the system you already have work considerably better. If you are attempting to reduce waste, bottlenecks and the invisible work quietly choking your organisation then Kanban might be just what you need in keeping the bastards honest.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the series is ICAgile and the Left-Leaning Independents.

The Agile Political Landscape Series: DevOps and Teal Independents

/ Craig Smith / 3 Comments

Please note: This is the fourth article in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

  1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
  2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
  3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
  4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian Party

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum needs its bridge-builders. Movements that refuse to fit neatly into traditional categories, that challenge established divides, and that prioritise outcomes over ideological purity. In the agile certification world, that’s DevOps.

DevOps emerged in the late 2000s from frustration with the fundamental divide between software development and IT operations. Developers wanted speed and change; operations wanted stability and control. The result was organisational silos, blame cultures, and slow, unreliable software delivery. In 2009, Patrick Debois organised the first DevOpsDays conference in Belgium, crystallising a movement that had been brewing in organisations struggling with this dysfunction.

The core insight of DevOps was never primarily technical, it was cultural. Yes, automation, continuous integration, and infrastructure as code became associated practices, but the fundamental shift was breaking down the wall between Dev and Ops: shared responsibility, collaborative problem-solving, and optimising for the whole system rather than individual silos. You can’t buy DevOps in a box. You must become it.

There is no single definition of DevOps as it became a set of practices and principles defined by the community. A number of bodies and vendors emerged offering certifications, including those focussed on culture and principles (DevOps Institute, ICAgile, and SAFe), and those on technical implementation (AWS, Microsoft, Google, and others). Like the Teal Independents, these certifications are themselves independent. There is no single governing authority, no party platform, only a shared set of principles. This is part of what makes DevOps sometimes misunderstood. And like the Independents movement itself, the ecosystem continues to grow, with DevSecOps, GitOps, and MLOps extending the same philosophy into new domains.

So who is DevOps’s political counterpart? As our left-progressive but pragmatic certification movement, DevOps maps to the Teal Independents.

The Teals emerged in 2022, winning traditionally Liberal seats by offering something that didn’t fit conventional party lines.  They are progressive on social and environmental issues, yet centre-right on economic policy, focused on fiscal responsibility and business effectiveness. They rejected the false choice between environmental action and economic pragmatism.

DevOps certifications mirror this exactly. Progressive on culture by breaking down silos, challenging hierarchies, emphasising collaboration; but pragmatic on delivery through efficiency, automation, reliable systems, measurable outcomes. Just as the Teals blended blue economics with green values, DevOps blends cultural progressiveness with operational pragmatism. Both movements emerged from rejecting a false dichotomy that had paralysed their respective fields.

This positioning explains where DevOps sits on the agile political spectrum. It sits firmly on the left-progressive side because it enables something fundamental – continuous delivery. The technical foundation that makes product operating models possible.

Think of it this way. An organisation might reorganise around product teams, leadership might embrace product thinking, but if it still takes weeks to get a change into production with manual testing, change approval boards, scheduled release windows and the like, then the organisation chart has changed but the operating model hasn’t. DevOps is what closes that gap. Without it, the transition to product-led ways of working stalls at the delivery pipeline.

For practitioners, DevOps certifications provide essential frameworks for understanding software delivery as a sociotechnical system.  It speaks to developers who need to care about operational concerns, and to operations professionals who need to embrace change and automation. For organisations, DevOps practices aren’t optional extras to bolt on after establishing product teams. The capability to deliver continuously must be built deliberately, and that requires both cultural change and significant technical investment.

Like a good independent MP, DevOps certifications won’t hand you a four-phase implementation plan. But they will help you understand what genuinely needs to change (culturally and technically) to make continuous delivery real.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the series is Kanban and the Australian Democrats.

The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian Party

/ Craig Smith / 4 Comments

Please note: This is the third article in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

  1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
  2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
  3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

DSDM emerged in 1994 from a consortium of UK organisations frustrated with failed IT projects. At the time, Rapid Application Development (RAD) was popular for its rapid prototyping and faster development, however, the movement was unstructured inviting some “cowboy” practices and issues around quality. DSDM was created by practitioners actually looking for more governance and stricter controls. They weren’t ideologists trying to revolutionise project delivery, they were pragmatists trying to find a balance between speed and quality. The result was one of the first true agile methods, with Arie van Bennekum representing the DSDM Consortium at the signing of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.

The DSDM philosophy centres on eight principles, including “focus on the business need”, “deliver on time”, and “build incrementally from firm foundations”. DSDM acknowledges that organisations need governance, stakeholders need confidence, and projects need structure, but it also wanted to allow teams to deliver value incrementally and adapt to change.

DSDM introduced some common agile practices still used today. Have you heard of MoSCoW prioritisation, timeboxing, iterative development, and continuous stakeholder involvement? These all came about in the creation of DSDM.

Yet DSDM remains unmistakably a project management approach. It defines roles like Business Sponsor, Project Manager, and Team Leader. It organises work into projects with defined phases: pre-project, feasibility, foundations, evolutionary development, deployment, and post-project. It emphasises business cases, feasibility studies, and formal review points.

In 2010, the DSDM Consortium partnered with APMG International offering three main certifications for Project Management, Business Analysis and Program Management –cementing DSDM’s positioning on the spectrum.

In 2016, the DSDM Consortium rebranded as the Agile Business Consortium and launched their Framework for Business Agility. On the surface, this looked like an evolution – moving beyond project delivery to address organisational agility. But here’s where the certification business model creates tension. The Agile Business Consortium now promotes business agility while their flagship offering remains AgilePM… Agile Project Management.

This is where DSDM faces the classic certification scale-up challenge: they built a successful business on project management certifications, saw the opportunity in business agility, but seemingly didn’t challenge their revenue stream far enough. They added to the market confusion that has inspired this series. How many of the 200,000+ AgilePM certification holders associate their credential with “business agility” because of the framework and branding? It’s a Kodak moment in reverse. Instead of a new technology disrupting the old business model, we saw the new concept (business agility) being absorbed into the old business model (agile project management).

DSDM has very specific appeal, typically chosen at an organisational level for its governance and control capabilities, often representing a logical evolutionary step from waterfall or RUP. While the framework itself is an organisational choice, it appeals strongly to project managers seeking an agile project management certification, offering them a structured approach that bridges traditional project governance with agile delivery.

So who is DSDM’s political counterpart? As our right-conservative, tactical agile certification, DSDM is equivalent to Katter’s Australian Party.

Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) is a right-conservative party, but not in the polished, establishment sense. It occupies a similar position in Australian politics that DSDM holds in the agile spectrum, both having carved out distinct identities outside the mainstream. KAP operates beyond the major party duopoly, while DSDM sits apart from dominant frameworks like Scrum and SAFe.

Both are conservative, but pragmatic rather than ideological. KAP blends traditional values with whatever works for regional communities; DSDM maintains project management foundations whilst adopting agile flexibility when needed. Neither appeals to purists or revolutionaries, instead they serve constituents who need practical solutions within existing constraints, valuing stability and proven approaches alongside necessary flexibility.

Both prioritise tangible results over theoretical purity. KAP focuses on concrete outcomes for rural and regional areas; DSDM emphasises delivering business value over perfect processes. And both have strong but geographically concentrated followings rather than global dominance, KAP in regional and rural Queensland, DSDM in the UK and European public sector organisations.

We are not sure about the parallels with crocodiles, or if cowboy hats are optional though.

DSDM has a valuable place in the market, particularly for project managers navigating the transition to agile. DSDM embraces the Project Manager, explicitly defining it as a key role responsible for traditional project management concerns while enabling teams to work iteratively.

If you’re a Project Manager looking for an “Agile Project Management” certification, AgilePM offers a straightforward and relatively affordable pathway. The Foundation and Practitioner structure provides clear progression without requiring continuous learning credits or subscription models – making it an accessible option for practitioners in conservative organisations with established PMOs and governance structures.

For organisations seeking business agility, continuous product delivery, or transformation of their operating model, understand what you’re getting: a tactical, right-conservative, project-based approach to agile delivery. The Agile Business Consortium branding might imply broader ambitions toward business agility, but the certification portfolio tells a different story. DSDM remains firmly project-focused.

Like its political counterpart, DSDM serves a specific constituency that values practical delivery within conservative structures. Just don’t mistake the “business agility” branding for a framework that challenges project-based thinking – because that would require challenging the very certification business that sustains it.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the Agile Political Landscape Series is: DevOps and Teal Independents

The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens

/ Craig Smith / 5 Comments

Please note: This is the third article in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum needs its idealists – parties that refuse to compromise on their principles that would make the world a better place. In the agile certification world, that is Large-Scale Scrum which decided to “choose a vowel” and became known as LeSS.

LeSS emerged in 2005 from the work of Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, early adopters of Scrum who were attempting to scale the framework across multiple teams. In those early days, Larman and Vodde were among the few voices addressing Scrum at scale, pioneering territory with their books and experiments. Over a decade of work involving more than 500 experiments, they discovered something fundamental: the problem wasn’t that Scrum didn’t scale, the problem was that traditional organisational thinking prevented it from scaling.

This insight became the foundation of LeSS. Fewer roles, fewer artefacts, fewer processes. They stripped away the organisational debt accumulated over decades of hierarchical thinking and proposed doing more with less. The framework is deliberately minimal as its primary purpose is descaling through simplification. One product owner, one product backlog, multiple teams working together in coordinated sprints. No scaling roles, artefacts, or ceremonies beyond what teams need to coordinate. LeSS acknowledges it’s not for every business context as it focuses on two clear objectives: building adaptability and delivering customer value.

LeSS describes itself as “barely sufficient methodology”, providing minimal rules to establish empirical process control and whole-product focus, then expecting organisations to think, learn, and adapt. For organisations aligned with these objectives, LeSS offers ten guiding principles with certain mandatory practices that define the start of the journey. Beyond this, there are no detailed prescriptions or step-by-step playbooks. Instead, LeSS provides rules (the minimum framework), principles (the thinking foundation), guides (recommendations worth trying), and experiments (situational options). This isn’t a methodology you implement; it’s a framework that defines a minimum standard and invites you to apply systems thinking and lean thinking to continuously improve your organisation toward your objectives.

So on our spectrum of agile certifications, who is LeSS’ political counterpart? As our far-left progressive agile certification, LeSS is equivalent to The Greens.

The parallels are immediate and striking.

Both emerged from direct experience with key problems being treated as negotiable. The Greens because environmental degradation was compromised away by major parties, LeSS because Larman and Vodde discovered that scaling Scrum required removing organisational impediments, not adding structure. Both demand systemic transformation: The Greens challenge capitalism’s growth imperative and advocate for radical power redistribution; LeSS eliminates command-and-control hierarchies and redistributes authority to self-organising teams.

Both champion grassroots empowerment and systems thinking. Both define a minimum acceptable state and argue that anything less undermines the outcomes they seek to achieve.

Both also share a common challenge: translating a principled vision into change within complex, existing systems. The Greens articulate a clear picture of sustainable societies while facing scrutiny over transition pathways within current economic structures. Similarly, LeSS articulates a clear minimum state for effective agility, while deliberately avoiding prescriptive transformation roadmaps. Both describe a minimum standard for an acceptable state and invites us to confront the gap between the current reality and meeting this standard. For some, this clarity is liberating; for others, it can feel confronting.

This explains why LeSS has such polarising appeal. For organisations genuinely committed to transformation, for leaders willing to challenge their own authority, for teams ready to take on real responsibility, LeSS provides a clear and uncompromising path – it’s honest about what’s required and doesn’t pretend you can have agility without changing power structures. The certifications reflect this philosophy: training will provide you with this acceptable standard, however, if you are operating in a project-led structure even this might seem like an insurmountable barrier.

LeSS appeals to an organisational profile that is looking to optimise towards adaptability and value delivery. If you’re working in a more traditional organisation with entrenched hierarchies, established governance structures, and risk-averse cultures, the radical simplification and structural changes LeSS requires will feel frustratingly disconnected from your reality. This doesn’t mean that LeSS is wrong, it likely means your organisation is optimising toward different objectives. In that case, LeSS becomes a reference point for what agile at scale could look like, rather than a framework that serves your current needs.

In many ways, LeSS resembles the Australian Greens party in politics – it articulates an ambitious, principle-driven vision of how things ought to work, appealing strongly to those who share its values. However, like the Greens operating within Australia’s established political system, LeSS can struggle to gain traction if your worldview is on the right-side of the spectrum.

There’s nothing wrong with unwavering principles and minimum standards. Progress requires people willing to articulate a vision, to refuse compromise, to insist that systemic problems require systemic solutions. The Greens serve this role in politics. LeSS serves this role in the agile political landscape.

For organisations ready to genuinely transform, LeSS might be exactly what you need. For organisations needing to navigating current realities such as command-and-control leadership and heavy bureaucracy, you may need to look elsewhere on the spectrum to address these constraints first. Like its political counterpart, LeSS isn’t trying to win over the pragmatists. It’s trying to inspire the revolutionaries.

Special thanks to Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Australia’s first Certified LeSS Trainer for his contributions to this article.

Footnote: In this article we specifically focused on LeSS as it fits within our requirement of offering an agile certification, however, we would like to acknowledge its place alongside others in what we have deemed the “ideal state movement”. This entire movement is rich with various approaches addressing work differently. Examples include Holacracy‘s elimination of hierarchy, FAST‘s fluid teaming and network structures, XScale‘s descaling and elimination of command-and-control, and Teal organisations‘ evolutionary purpose made famous in Laloux’s cultural model.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the Agile Political Landscape series is: DSDM and Katter’s Australian Party

The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation

/ Craig Smith / 6 Comments

Please note: This is article 2 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what we have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The first blog in the series is What if Agile certifications were a political party?

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum needs a far-right party and in the agile certification world, that’s PRINCE2 Agile. The agile extension to a project management methodology called PRojects IN Controlled Environments, version 2 (PRINCE2) wears its conservative credentials openly.

In 1989, a UK government department created PRINCE seeking to protect itself from project failure through rigid process, strong governance and uncompromising control. Updated to PRINCE2 in 1996, these rigorous controls, defined decision points and detailed documentation requirements were designed to provide transparency and auditability considered critical in public-sector environments, but they also made the framework process-heavy and bureaucratic. The approach worked: PRINCE2 became one of the world’s most widely adopted project management frameworks.

Fast forward to 2015. The agile movement had transformed software development and was making inroads into broader business practices. PRINCE2 Agile emerged as an attempt to give organisations a way to adopt agile methods within the PRINCE2 framework. The goal was to preserve the strategic direction, business justification, and stage-gate controls of PRINCE2 while enabling teams to work in a more collaborative, incremental manner. In practice, that meant layering agile practices onto PRINCE2 governance rather than rethinking the underlying assumptions of the framework.

PRINCE2 Agile was launched with scepticism. The agile community rejected it for not being agile enough. The PRINCE2 community worried it was letting go of too much control. Caught between two worlds, PRINCE2 Agile largely satisfied neither.

This is the challenge of compromise and to PeopleCert’s credit, they’ve acknowledged it. In a recent conversation, Markus Bause (VP Product at PeopleCert, the owners of PRINCE2) reflected candidly on this balance. The organisation responded by releasing Version 2, which places greater emphasis on mindset, people and leadership, while significantly improving the learning experience. This is a topic Sean Blunt explored further in his article Agile Leadership: Enabling Government Transformation.

Version 2 offers a broad introduction to agile. It defines the mindset, values and principles and covers several techniques and approaches considered part of an agile toolkit. There are some interesting terminology and structure choices along the way, but overall, it provides a reasonable introduction to the fundamentals of agile project management.

However, as its name suggests, the certification on offer is PRINCE2 + Agile. At the intersection of fundamentally different philosophies, compromise is inevitable. But compromises reveal priorities. PRINCE2 by design prioritises slow, structured, risk-averse progression over speed, experimentation and rapid value delivery. The entire model assumes that careful planning, authorised stages, and methodical oversight are inherently safer than moving quickly, adapting frequently or learning through iteration. PRINCE2 Agile is a compromise that restricts agile to its most conservative form.

So on our spectrum of agile certifications, who is PRINCE2 Agile’s political counterpart? As our far-right conservative, PRINCE2 Agile is equivalent to One Nation.

We now hear the chorus “please explain”.

One Nation is a nationalist, socially conservative party sceptical of change and strong on government control. The parallels to PRINCE2 Agile are striking. Both were born from a desire to protect; One Nation from perceived threats to national identity, PRINCE2 from project failure. Both prioritise control over adaptation. Both are suspicious of external influences that might challenge their worldview and both struggle when reality demands flexibility.

Just as One Nation wants strong government control and has protectionist tendencies, PRINCE2 was born from a government department wanting to protect itself through rigid process and governance. PRINCE2 Agile attempts to liberalise this ideology, to let in some outside influence, but only on its own terms. Agile practices are permitted, but they are constrained to operate within PRINCE2’s governance framework. The conservative DNA remains intact.

This explains why PRINCE2 Agile has such a specific, narrow worldview. It defines how agile can be applied in “projects” and “business-as-usual” but disregards any notion of an operating model where products have continuous lifecycles independent of project boundaries. Like its political counterpart, PRINCE2 Agile knows how the world should work and anything outside that framework somewhat doesn’t exist.

PRINCE2 Agile has a legitimate place in the market, specifically for organisations already operating within the PRINCE2 framework who need to introduce agile project management practices. If you’re in a heavily regulated environment with genuine compliance requirements or working in government contexts where PRINCE2 governance is mandated, PRINCE2 Agile may be exactly what you need to increase speed.

The challenge arises when PRINCE2 Agile becomes someone’s only exposure to agile thinking. You’ll learn about “being agile” over “doing agile”, some agile practices and some lightweight methods but all within a structured project management governance model. You’ll understand iteration but not continuous delivery. You’ll practice ceremonies but not self-organisation. You’ll know agile vocabulary but not agile as a business operating model. It’s a starting point, not the full spectrum.

For practitioners building agile capabilities or organisations genuinely seeking business agility, understand what you’re getting: agile project management within PRINCE2, not agile transformation. There’s nothing wrong with that – as long as it’s intentional.

In the end, PRINCE2 Agile is doing exactly what One Nation does: serving a specific constituency with clear, unwavering views about how things should work. Both have their supporters, both have their critics, and both will insist they’re more flexible than they actually are. If your organisation lives in PRINCE2 territory and needs to introduce some agile practices without causing a governance revolt, PRINCE2 Agile is your candidate. Just don’t expect it to lead a revolution – that’s not what conservatives do. And whatever you do, don’t ask it to “please explain” why everything must fit within project boundaries. You’ll be there for several stage-gates.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the Agile Political Landscape series is: LeSS and The Greens

What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?

/ Craig Smith / 6 Comments

Over the last couple of decades, we have been pushing towards agility as a catalyst for a different way of working entirely. It’s interesting to reflect on where agility has ended up today.At the same time, traditional project management approaches talk about agile purely through a project management lens rather than a broader business and product context and as a result we aren’t always speaking the same language. To close that gap, you can use two different phrases:

“Agile within a project management operating model”
“Agility within a product management operating model”

Meeting organisations where they are matters more than ever. The agile industry took four values and twelve principles and somehow created hundreds of methods, wars between approaches, an alphabet soup of certifications, and a handful of enterprise frameworks each claiming to be the silver bullet. We’ve ended up with organisations at vastly different points on their journey and lots (and lots) of confusion in between.

Same word – agile – but very different contexts. Then it occurred to my long-time colleague Daniel Luschwitz, agile is just like politics. Both operate on a continuum left and right of centre. The further away from the centre to the right is a more conservative ideology, whereas to the left is a more progressive ideology.

In agile terms, the centre is the tipping point between:

Project-led agile (right-conservative)
Product-led agile (left-progressive)


Agile even has a constitution – the AgileManifesto. A set of 4 values and 12 principles that mostly any agile approach references and considers itself as following.

We also have a lot of ‘healthy’ debate in both politics and agile. Much like we hear in the halls of parliament “that is unconstitutional”; the agile community has been known to throw a few “that is not agile” phrases around too.

So, all this raises the question: if the various agile certifications were Australian political parties, what party would they be? Who would be our Australian Labor Party, Liberal Party of Australia and The Australian Greens parties? Do we have a contender for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, the Trumpet of Patriots or the Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party?

Where does the various incarnations of Scrum fit in the political landscape? Is SAFe progressive or conservative? Do any agile certifications have their ‘bee in a bonnet’ about paper bags?

To complete this exposé of the agile political world, Daniel Luschwitz brought me in to help write this series, ads, in his words, I am an authority on the agile landscape, “40 agile methods in 40 minutes” creator, and having served on the Agile Alliance Board I am technically a retired agile politician… and we all know what happens when retired politicians talk!

What’s next?

Over the coming posts, Daniel and I plan to map well-known certifications and frameworks across the Agile Political Spectrum.

Why?

It should be a bit of fun. Plus, Daniel has told too many people he plans to write this to back out now.

However, there is a serious side to this. The market is saturated with agile certifications and in many cases participants, managers of teams and recruiters haven’t fully understood what context the certification they have received serves. Our aim is to create awareness.

In the meantime, we welcome you to join in the debate! Who is your far-right conservative agile party?

The first article in the series is: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation

Note: This article was amended slightly form the original published by Daniel Luchwitz to be written from my perspective.

All the Remote Things – Agile as the Journey and not the Destination with Craig Smith

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

It was a privilege to be invited by my good mate Tony Ponton to speak on his other podcast All The Remote Things.

In this episode we are joined by Global Agility Lead, Craig Smith who, up until recently, was also the director of Agile Alliance. Craig chats to us about his time at Agile Alliance and what the future holds for the organisation. We also discuss the updates Craig has made to his ’40 agile methods in 40 minutes’ and how there isn’t necessarily a blueprint when choosing the right agile methods for your organisation. Get in touch – Podcast – https://theagilerevolution.com/ Agile Alliance – https://www.agilealliance.org/ Craig’s website – https://craigsmith.id.au/

Agile Summit: 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes – 2022 Edition

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

AVSMy talk with from Agile Virtual Summit called “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes: 2022 Edition” is available below:

2022 – Agile Virtual Summit – 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes

More to come.

InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2022 Podcast

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In this podcast the InfoQ Culture & Methods editors, along with special guest Sandy Mamoli, discuss what they have seen over the last year and the trends they see going forward.

Source: InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2022