[oldmanjay]

I spent a long time at a boutique consultancy that specialized in rescuing at-risk software projects for fortune 100 firms. Mainly, that meant we got very, very good at building up waterfall adapters for our internal processes.

I won't say we were following agile, exactly, but the concept remains approximately the same. Big company management thrives on the mistaken notion that they can plan out the world years in advance. The key insights that made our adapters work were 1) no one has enough of a memory to hold anyone to those plans even six months down the line and 2) no one expects anything to work anyway, since they're all used to their plans falling over.

Which isn't to say this is going to work. I suspect that, like all things recent IBM, any success they find will be more attributable to inertia than execution excellence.

edit: clarification