AvenueCode

Is Agile too ambitious?
After attending hundreds of Agile conferences, lecturers and reading three bookshelf worth of Agile books.  Seeing Agilests and Agilestas hash about continuous integration, continuous delivery, scrums, planning and more planning.  Retrospective, and of course repeating the four phrases of the Omar Khayyam style Agile Manifesto.  Then later on see them rehash the same exact methods all over again using similar terms but with completely different meanings, I realized that they’re only doing what a smart methodology should do, evolve.  Only that, they are caught in the rigidity of the moment.  Mostly, they are telling users this is what we found that works, go do it.  As oppose to this is how we found the answer to what works, go find yours too.  I’m certain this last paragraph will get me in trouble, but I’m in no means being disrespectful to the Agile practitioners out there.  I have been doing the same thing, this literature should be taking as a different perspective on the approach, and I hope this idea can get enough attention to take on a life of its own as well, and have contributors further refine it with further studies outside of mine.
 
So to answer the above question, if we think of Agile as a single framework for different methodologies (scrum, xp, pair, etc..) then I believe it is too ambitious to address the various organizational problems all at once.  But if we think of it as a set of practices and tools that allow a single organization to incubate a framework that works with their own unique set of challenges, mostly utilizing a healthy mix of all available processes in addition to custom, self made ones, then ask the question again, is Agile too ambitious? and the answer would then be absolutely not. 
 
Since the term “Agile” is highly over used at this point of time, I chose to call this later set of activities, Fast Intellectual Transition, or FIT.