The Agile Enterprise: 50 Years of Agile Project Delivery

Agile is still a hot topic; many organisations have adopted or intend to adopt an Agile delivery approach for activities other than software development. Most Agile practitioners and training courses indicate that Agile started in 2001 when the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published. At the time, a few approaches to a new way of developing software emerged independently as an unintended outcome of software development projects. Little known is that Agile, as a product development approach, started decades before the publication of the "Agile Manifesto" as a response to the success of Lean Six Sigma. Half a century ago, the industry realised that in the 21st Century, perfect quality and low price are not enough for an organisation to be successful. The new Business environment needed a new kind of organisation: they called it the Agile Enterprise, and the rest is history.