Agile is not About Laissez-Faire

Many people and companies think of Agile as some kind of Laissez-Faire approach to project management and software development. Agile is in fact a very rigid structure on how to do things so that there may be flexibility in what to do.

Agile project management is based on advanced project management concepts such as earned-value management (EVM) and phased rolling planning.

Agile software development is based on continuous quality control, other practices that are known to generate quality and a tight feedback loop with stakeholders.

An ant hill

Newton wood has some huge ant hills - this is one of them. © Copyright Brian Henley and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence, click image for details.


There is no grand master plan or architect for an ant hill. Ants simply follow simple behavioural rules. The ant hill emerges as a result of millions of ants mindlessly following these rules.

About Greger Wikstrand

Greger Wikstrand, Ph.D. M.Sc. is a TOGAF 9 certified enterprise architect with an interest in e-heatlh, m-health and all things agile as well as processes, methods and tools. Greger Wikstrand works as a consultant at Capgemini where he alternates between enterprise agile coaching, problem solving and designing large scale e-health services ...

3 Comments

  1. Greg, what an ant hill! I think that’s the biggest I’ve ever seen. Great comparison between the work of ants and the agile process. The rigid structure of agile can be a brilliant way of rapidly building multiple blocks into a huge hill. I It usually bites less than ants though!

    Luke Winter
    Community Manager
    OneDesk

    • You really think I have managed to come up with a new metaphor for agile? That would be wonderful. BTW had a brief look at your web site and it seems like an interesting product.

  2. Pingback: Will ITIL survive Agile and DevOps? - Greger Wikstrand

Leave a Reply