In my last post “What’s next for Agile?”, I talked about alignment between the development team and the business, from the customer focus perspective.

As I was watching “Agile is dead, long live agile” presentation by Jeff Sutherland, from Oredev 2010, I felt I needed to add something.

When does agile work? According to Jeff, when management commits to it.  In fact, Jeff as a VC, backs only companies that their management is committed to do the change (or already practicing scrum).

So it works when both management and the development team are aligned. This is inward alignment: From management into the development organization, and I assume others as well.

Where’s the customer focus?

I assume VCs won’t invest in companies that don’t have a viable solutions or products for their customers. So the combination of solving customer problems and an entire organization practicing agile are the formula for success.

So what’s next for agile? Whole business alignment – both process-wise and customer-wise.