The C-suite only hear "fast delivery" and ignore the other parts while also demanding the waterfall parts that suit the ways they need to work such as committing devs to deadlines one financial year out when funding bids have to be submitted.
There is something ironic about being ordered to estimate a 12 month work order while also being told make sure "it's agile" and delivered on time and on budget by ++currrentYear.
yes, non-agile organizations try to bolt on agile at the 'bottom' of the hierarchy, and that's a sure recipe for failure because of the significant impedance mismatch that causes. the c-suite wants to hand down directives, and the agile teams want to listen to the customer first, leading to conflicting interests.
an organization has to be receptive to turning the marketing function upside down (product being one of the 4 P's of marketing) to be really successful at agile. that's why consulting firms tend to be more successful than ordinary product/service firms at it, because they're already inverting the marketing function (to lead with what the customer wants and then trying to execute on that).
executives don't tend to want successfully implemented agile, as it undermines their control of (customer/market) information, and the organizational power derived from that.
In my mind, this sorta proves that most companies should not have in-house engineering divisions and instead most of us should be working for software engineering firms much like actual architects. This would likely also solve the career development/engineering pedagogy problem that is so lamented since firms would have better control over time internally.
So true, and some even have budget boards that decide on allocation of money to the teams according to the central strategy, so the POs need to follow those priorities and justify what they do based on that instead of 'increasing value of the product'.
There is something ironic about being ordered to estimate a 12 month work order while also being told make sure "it's agile" and delivered on time and on budget by ++currrentYear.