Currently, I work as a Scrum Coach for both teams and organizations, and there will be work along these lines for many years to come for the simple reason that adopting Agile, and specifically Scrum, is easy to do and easy to do poorly and in name only, which is what most companies unfortunately do.

Agile and Scrum together are truly transformational approaches to getting work done. Merely adopting the practices into a slowly moving business/bottom line focused company is not enough to transform the company or their culture as Agile and Scrum actually demand. Without transformation, the adoption of Scrum will become mere paint on top of a waterfall world of project management, and it will fail. When the company tries to figure out why, maybe they will be lucky and find out all that they are missing and will begin the process of truly transforming, maybe they won’t. It is a fact that you will not see all the purported benefits of Scrum and Agile without truly transforming your organization to become truly people-centric, not just customer-centric for they are just some of the people affected.

To become an Agile organization should be the goal, and most companies fall short of that goal time and time again. Burnt enough by multiple attempts to “go Agile,” they will invariably give up and go back to the old ways, the waterfall ways until they die out due to competition kicking their butts or get new leadership that actually understand the value proposition of Scrum and Agile, and what it means for the world of management, corporate culture and their actual bottom line over the long term.

I remember when Scrum was just a fad; that was when I found it. Despite the predictions of the day that it would die out quickly in favor of some newer shiner fad, I recognized right away that it was going to dominate the world of software development, and now I believe it will begin to dominate the way the world gets work done period over the coming decades.

What all this means to me is that I have job security doing what I do until retirement or I just up and decide to stop working. Good luck if you don’t believe me.