PMI Masticates Agile Alliance

The News

masticate /măs′tĭ-kāt″/

To chew. To grind and knead into a pulp.

Today, we learned that Agile Alliance has merged with the Project Management Institute. In the coming months and years, Agile Alliance will be entirely masticated by PMI.

Already, the PMI logo is splattered all over the agilealliance.org website. I predict all blog articles, videos, and other intellectual property will be migrated to the PMI website; Agile Alliance members will be added to PMI’s mailing lists and bombarded with PMI content.

Soon, there will be no way to distinguish Agile Alliance materials from Disciplined Agile (which PMI acquired years ago) or PMI’s own “Agile”-flavoured resources. All of it will have been entirely chewed up, digested, and shat onto the pages of PMI.org for maximum SEO effect.

In time, Agile Alliance’s identity will dissolve entirely. We can only hope that Ward Cunningham remains the registrant of the domain agilemanifesto.org, ensuring it’s not absorbed by PMI.

Why I’m Not Surprised

The Business Model Was Never Sustainable

In the early days, Agile Alliance was a group of volunteers who maintained a website, advertised like-minded industry events, and helped people turn their ideas into books. Its business model was simple and inexpensive with near-zero overhead. Individuals or small groups who were self-organizing and loosely coupled, like the XPToronto group or other early adopters, would send a message to webmaster@agilealliance.org and say, “Hey, we exist!” — the page of User Groups was maintained by Ken Schwaber. Similarly, the producers of TiddlyWiki or other software tools would send an email to Hubert Smits for inclusion in the “Related tools & techniques” list.

The group also undertook the difficult task of organizing a few conferences. These conferences grew over time, attracting high-profile sponsors, and became lucrative events. As the conference revenue ballooned and to their credit, Agile Alliance invested in and curated community-driven content. However, intellectual property would prove to not be enough to sustain the operation in the long run.

The first major blow to conference revenues came in 2020 as governments imposed lockdowns and restricted travel. The next major blow was the layoffs of hundreds of Agile Coaches from Capital One and the innumerable cascade of other companies that did the same.

And while it’s easy to blame Covid-era policies for their struggle, I assert the conferences were already in decline prior to 2020. There’s only so many times one can pay thousands of dollars to hear the reruns of presentations about emotional intelligence, psychological safety, or what jazz musicians can teach us about continuous improvement. Many began to question the ROI of attending.

Today, Agile Alliance’s shrinking revenue shows that its focus was no longer aligned with the needs of the community, leaving PMI to capitalize on the remaining brand value.

Agile Alliance Lost Its Way

When I first heard of Agile Alliance in 2007, I was drawn to its mission of advocating for better software development practices. It was a movement grounded in humility, merit, and empirical learning. However, what began as a grassroots effort to improve software development soon became a vehicle for personal advancement and political activism.

This became clear to me when, at an Agile Alliance conference in Washington, a prominent speaker at the event declared that the Agile community was on the cusp of leading humanity to a higher level of consciousness. (Paraphrased, I don’t remember the exact statement.) I had heard this sort of grandiosity years earlier at a Global Scrum Gathering, and I had hoped the idea would die — but the idea had spread and somewhere along the way a fundamental change had taken place. The humble pursuit to uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others to do it had died — replaced by a vanity project to steer all of humanity along a utopian moral trajectory.

An in-group/out-group dynamic had developed. I was once part of the “in-group” — a frequent speaker at Agile conferences like the annual Agile Alliance event, the XPxxxx series, and the Scrum Gatherings. I was even the Executive Producer of the Regional Scrum Gathering Canada in 2018. In recent years, I’ve felt uncomfortable and unwelcome as an “in group” naturally and inevitably grows more insular, competitive, and selective — eventually everyone but the most ambitious (or most oblivious) will agree to be involved.

Agile Alliance, once a forum for diverse opinions, had morphed into an organization that promoted a specific worldview. Rather than fostering open discussions on software development practices, it began to dictate what people should believe and how they should behave.

Certain points of view were expressly denounced and good people were shunned merely because they expressed support for unpopular ideas or political leanings. I would not wish for the organization to be “right-wing” — but I had hoped it would remain politically neutral. Agile Alliance is no longer on a mission of humility, merit, and empiricism. It’s become overtly left-leaning given the emphasis on globalism and identity-politics. Recall Agile Alliance had to publish this missive when its members were upset that a conference was, wait for it… in Texas. 😱

Rather than promptly caution those who were triggered to keep their activism to themselves, Agile Alliance instead reassured everyone of their undying support for diversity, social justice, and equity, and promised the event would be “safe and inclusive”. Unless, of course, someone should question that ethos or let slip an alternate viewpoint during cocktail hour, they were promptly derided and excluded — excommunicado — and never to speak at the conferences again.

This shift is a reminder of Robert Conquest’s Second and Third Laws of Politics:

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest explanation for any bureaucratic organization’s behavior is to assume it’s controlled by a group hostile to its original purpose.

Agile Alliance as Clergy

The most alarming development came with the publication of a "Code of Ethics" for Agile Coaches. I found this problematic not only because no two people on this Earth can agree on a definition of “Agile Coach”, but because specific individuals felt so confident in their handle on human nature and morality, so confident that their personal predisposition is so unblemished, that they can tell others how they should behave and why “Agile” coaches should see themselves as key figures in driving humanity through its next phase of enlightenment.

Reading this “Code of Ethics” was the final straw for me. I almost puked when I read it. I was physically ill, with a turning in my stomach. It felt as if the organization had transformed into a new-age clergy, a faith-based group intent on shaping the moral compass of its members rather than focusing on practical, technical expertise.

As I get older, I’m increasingly aware of my own flaws and mistakes. I don’t claim moral superiority, nor am I inclined to subscribe so readily to the moralizing of others.

Mixed Feelings

As someone who once contributed to and supported Agile Alliance events, I feel both relieved and disappointed.

I’m relieved that the days of Agile Alliance, in its current form, are numbered.

At the same time, I’m disappointed to watch an organization that once championed innovation and empirical learning devolve into a platform for moral and political overreach. Within a few years, the Agile Alliance logo will be seen on a landing page at pmi.org and conference booths selling PMI certifications. I doubt this is what the co-authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development had in mind.