[dingaling]

> Does Agile really not work with large enterprises?

It works well when you can control or bound the expectations of your users. Delivering a gradually-expanding customer self-service portal, for example, is a perfect candidate for agile processes.

However, it doesn't work when the requirements are legal or financial compliance. There is seldom an opportunity to iterate and improve, it needs to be done once and fully by the go-live date. You can't release a small part of a compliance project ahead of schedule because, well, it wouldn't be compliant... Date-bounding makes-up a large proportion of enterprise business logic for this reason.

Counter-intuitively a large enterprise actually needs to be more flexible in its project management and methodology than a small, "agile" start-up. Deploy whichever technique is appropriate for the task, which means you have to have adaptable staff.

Source: having worked for a Fortune 100 that was agile-ising.

[shockzzz]

That makes sense, I think. Though in the spirit of the original authors, it sounds like it's more about collaborating and getting things working bit-by-bit rather than releasing publicly.

In the legal/financial compliance zone, it's probably about "here are the things we need to get done for this aspect of compliance," and then just doing them.

We're saying the same things, yeah?

[talmand]

Yes. Compliance things can be broken down into smaller deliverables just like anything else. You just have to make sure what the feature being delivered is compliant if it is being released to production. Just because something is being "delivered" doesn't mean it's going directly into the hands of clients.