March 2016: When Is Agile Not Agile?

I have, over the course of the last two months, chatted to numerous contacts from the buy-side, the sell-side, and the third-party vendor community about the Agile software development methodology and its applications and benefits for capital markets firms. I had expected to find some firms using Agile sporadically across the business—dabbling, but not fully throwing their weight behind it—but what transpired during my dozen or so calls was the discovery that apparently Agile is alive and well in our industry and is being used extensively by various firms.

For example, UBS has been using Agile for all development on its UBS Delta portfolio analysis and risk management platform since that operating unit was launched approximately a decade ago (although the Agile moniker wasn’t as well-known back then as it is now), while London-based hedge fund Aspect Capital similarly uses Agile exclusively.

Jersey City, NJ-based traditional asset manager, Lord Abbett and Co., on the other hand, employs a mix of Agile and Waterfall on a 50/50 basis, determined by the development work involved. Clearly, like pretty much all technologies available in our industry, capital markets firms need to assess each on its merits and decide on a case-by-case basis how relevant and practical it is to them, their clients, their existing technology stacks, and their in-house expertise.        

But just a few days ago, I received a press release from a buy-side-focused technology provider announcing that it had just adopted an Agile strategy and that instead of providing its buy-side clients with annual updates to their platforms, it was now reducing that cycle to quarterly releases. I guess everyone has their own take on Agile and what such a strategy might look like in practice, but I’m not too sure how many practitioners would agree that shortening a release cycle from a year to three months constitutes Agile.

I’d be willing to bet that the 17 developers who met at the Snowbird resort in Utah back in 2001, who collectively went on to publish the Agile Manifesto, would be anything but impressed by that disclosure. After all, Agile is all about creating immediate value by producing minimum credible releases early and often, collaborating closely with end-users to ensure they get a product that they had a hand in designing, and using that crucial feedback loop to drive the look and feel of future releases via short sprint cycles—certainly a lot shorter than every three months. 

So yes, Agile means different things to different organizations and some have adopted it to a greater extent than others. But what’s important when considering such an initiative is that doing a little bit is better than doing nothing at all.