The main gripe I have with this analysis is it weds the short-term sprint cycle with customer exposure & feedback. It then argues that, well, we can't let customers change their minds every two weeks and Big Serious Things take 20 months to get working so this is just for like web contractors and stuff.
I don't see agile as exclusively requiring you to expose everything you do to your end-users as you make it. I get that it can accommodate that if that's what you want, but the real essence of it is about de-risking a project by breaking things down into shorter milestones.
Do you remember those Microsoft Press software management books? So good. One point was "Beware of a Guy in a Room".[1] Which is to say, don't let developers shut their door and go dark for months at a time without surfacing with something working. It can take a bit more work to adapt a big project into smaller "working" milestones and seem silly and inefficient, but in the end this helps avoid a lot of risks that can lead to deathmarches that can truly kill a project.
One way to adapt the "customer" aspect of agile is to not have an actual live customer but rather a "voice of the market" that the product manager represents. After all, you do want to empower them to course correct because the world can change over 8-20 months. This applies even to BigTable.
I don't see agile as exclusively requiring you to expose everything you do to your end-users as you make it. I get that it can accommodate that if that's what you want, but the real essence of it is about de-risking a project by breaking things down into shorter milestones.
Do you remember those Microsoft Press software management books? So good. One point was "Beware of a Guy in a Room".[1] Which is to say, don't let developers shut their door and go dark for months at a time without surfacing with something working. It can take a bit more work to adapt a big project into smaller "working" milestones and seem silly and inefficient, but in the end this helps avoid a lot of risks that can lead to deathmarches that can truly kill a project.
One way to adapt the "customer" aspect of agile is to not have an actual live customer but rather a "voice of the market" that the product manager represents. After all, you do want to empower them to course correct because the world can change over 8-20 months. This applies even to BigTable.
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/david_gristwood/2004/06/24/...