Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but at some point, if nobody can follow a set of guidelines right, and projects following said guidelines tend to fail just as frequently as those which don't, could we say there is a problem with the guidelines as well? A set of principles that nobody seems to be able to follow correctly surely has a fundamental problem?
I've actually been on a team that did agile well. (XP, which is a subset.) It worked just like it was supposed to... ... until an upper manager couldn't understand our progress without documents the way he was used to. He also insisted on a large increase of scope without a change of schedule. And that was that. It wasn't that we were failing to deliver. It was that upper management couldn't handle the lack of their…
If management ends up interfering, and since Agile is supposed to be "about people", and management is people, Agile seems to be just as prone to mismanagement as other practices/principles, right?
I didn't mean that within a small team it doesn't work. I think there is merit to lowercase-a agile. But if capital-A Agile -- which is supposedly all about communication* -- fails to communicate with upper management, then where does that leave us?