> 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.
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.