Does agility still need control gates?
I’m very enthusiastic about Agile software development. I believe it fits the way people want to work and it brings out the best in people. There is one downside though: every now and again I run into people who oppose everything that could loosely be associated with “old-style” project management.
I think this is a bad thing. For one because these “old” techniques were also devised by intelligent people who probably had the best interest of software development in mind. But more importantly because you miss out on an opportunity to learn.
One of these fields is whether you should have control gates in agile projects:
In project management, a control gate may be viewed as a point in time when the system development effort will be evaluated and when management will determine whether the project should continue as is, change direction or be discontinued.
If you don’t believe in projects anymore you may also think control gates shouldn’t be used because you can change easily after every sprint. The reality however is that agility on an enterprise level is not nearly as “agile” as for small start-ups.
In my opinion, when scaling agile to an enterprise level, you still need to build in control gates in your processes. The sprint-to-sprint feedback simply won’t be enough when working with multiple teams on a product portfolio.
“By the way: I don’t think agile == scrum, that’s just the framework we’re using so I tend to use it in my examples.”
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