Please note: This is article 8 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents
6. The Agile Political Landscape Series: Kanban and the Australian Democrats
7. The Agile Political Landscape Series: ICAgile and the Left-Leaning Independents

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum has its right-leaning independents. Not party loyalists, not ideologues, but professionals who built their authority within an established discipline, created a constituency around it, and when the political winds shifted, didn’t abandon their ground. They absorbed the new language, translated it into terms their community already understood, and carried on.

In the agile certification world, that role belongs to PMI, IIBA and ISTQB.

The Project Management Institute (PMI), the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), and the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) weren’t born from the agile movement. Each was built on the conviction that project management, business analysis, and software testing were distinct professional disciplines, each deserving its own body of knowledge, its own structured credential, and its own seat at the table. All three had developed substantial, globally recognised certification architectures on that premise long before agile became the dominant conversation in solutions delivery. And when that conversation became impossible to ignore, all three made the same move: they added agile to what they already offered, on their own terms.

PMI was the earliest and perhaps the most deliberate about it. The Project Management Institute had spent decades building the PMP into arguably the most recognised project management credential on the planet. When agile began reshaping how solutions were delivered, PMI had a problem: the profession it represented was being told, by increasingly loud voices, that its core assumptions were wrong. Rather than engage with that critique, PMI launched the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner, the PMI-ACP, in 2011. The message was clear: agile is a toolkit, and project managers can learn to use it. The PMI-ACP covers a broad range of agile and hybrid approaches, drawing on methodologies from across the spectrum to demonstrate that agile competency is an addition to the project manager’s repertoire, not a replacement for it. The role stayed intact. The credential adapted around it.

The absorption deepened from there. In 2019, PMI acquired Disciplined Agile from Scott Ambler and Mark Lines, and weeks later FLEX from Al Shalloway‘s Net Objectives; some of the more thoughtful independent voices in the agile community. Then came PMBOK 7 in 2021, the most complete move of all. The Guide abandoned the architecture that had defined the profession for decades – ten knowledge areas, forty-nine processes, the full procedural edifice – and restructured itself around twelve principles and eight performance domains, with a new vocabulary of value delivery, stewardship, and tailoring. Every principle could be reconciled with agile, lean, traditional, or hybrid ways of working. Presented as modernisation, it was also a reframing broad enough that almost no position within the delivery community sat outside it. The Guide no longer committed itself to a method; it committed itself to being the container within which methods live.

IIBA and ISTQB followed the same instinct. Because the question agile was really asking, whether specialist roles like the BA and the dedicated tester needed to exist in their traditional form within self-organising teams, was precisely the question neither body had any institutional interest in answering honestly. So they answered a different one. They asked how agile delivery changes the context these disciplines operate in, and built certifications around that. IIBA demonstrated this instinct directly: business analysis became “agile analysis”, the BABOK grew an agile extension, and a new certification emerged to recognise competency in delivering analysis within an agile context. ISTQB followed the same pattern. The vocabulary changed. The disciplines they described did not.

They weren’t alone in this approach. Across the professional credentialling landscape, a number of established bodies followed the same instinct, extending their frameworks to acknowledge agile without disturbing the structures those frameworks were built to protect. The pattern is consistent: take the new vocabulary, demonstrate how your discipline remains relevant within it, and issue a credential that bridges the two worlds. It’s not cynical. It’s what professional bodies do. They exist to conserve something, and they’re good at it.

So who are PMI, IIBA and ISTQB’s political counterparts?

As our discipline-first, reframe-rather-than-reform agile certifications, they map to the right-leaning independents: professionals who enter the political arena not to change the system but to make sure their constituency is protected within it. Independent of the major parties, pragmatic in their dealings, and deeply conservative in the one area that matters most: the continued relevance of the professional community they represent.

The parallels are direct. Right-leaning independents don’t arrive in parliament with a transformation agenda. They arrive with a specific brief: protect these jobs, represent this industry, make sure this community isn’t left behind by whatever the major parties decide to do next. PMI, IIBA and ISTQB carry exactly that brief. Their mandate isn’t to reimagine how solutions are built. It’s to ensure that project managers, business analysts, and testers retain a credentialled, respected place in whatever delivery model their organisations adopt. Agile is the context. It is not the cause.

This is also why the agile content within these certifications tends to feel like an additional module rather than a rewrite of the core. It is worth acknowledging that PMI made genuine strides here: the shift to a principles-based model in their later standards represented real philosophical movement, not just rebranding. But even with that evolution, the agile extensions across all three bodies still sit on top of established role structures, the knowledge domains, the professional boundaries, all remain structurally intact. Agile is introduced as a context the discipline now operates within, not a lens that reexamines whether the discipline, in its current form, is still the right tool. The project manager still manages. The BA still analyses. The tester still tests. The world changed around them, and the certification acknowledges that. The professional identity at the centre did not move.

Right-leaning independents are notably pragmatic about language. When the political winds shift, they update their messaging before they update their positions. All three bodies demonstrated this instinct. All three speak agile fluently, and they mean it, but the fluency is in service of protecting the ground they already hold. The translation is genuine. The priorities underneath it are unchanged.

For practitioners, that’s not necessarily a problem. A project manager holding the PMI-ACP brings something real to an agile context: breadth across multiple approaches, familiarity with hybrid environments, and a structured lens for managing complexity. An experienced business analyst who understands stakeholder facilitation, business value, and how to navigate complex organisational constraints brings real value to an agile team. A tester with genuine capability in risk, coverage, and quality thinking is an asset in any delivery environment. These certifications offer a structured bridge between deep existing expertise and the agile context it now operates within. That’s worth something, and it shouldn’t be dismissed.

For organisations, understand what you’re investing in: practitioners equipped to apply their discipline within agile delivery, not practitioners equipped to question whether that discipline, as currently structured, is what the team actually needs. In environments where project management, BA, and testing functions are well established and role clarity matters, these may be exactly the right credentials. In environments genuinely rethinking their operating model, the role boundaries these certifications reinforce may be part of what you’re trying to move beyond.

Right-leaning independents serve a real constituency and they serve it honestly. They’re not in parliament to lead a revolution. They’re there to make sure that when the revolution arrives, the people they represent still have a seat at the table. PMI, IIBA and ISTQB do exactly the same thing. They didn’t reshape agile. They made sure agile had room for the professionals who were already in the room. Whether that’s the credential you need depends entirely on whether your goal is to fit agile around your existing structure, or to let agile challenge it.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz.

Please note: This is article 7 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents
6. The Agile Political Landscape Series: Kanban and the Australian Democrats

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum has its left-leaning independents. Not career politicians shaped by party preselection and factional compromise, but people who arrive carrying genuine depth in a field, a clear set of values, and a conviction that none of the available options adequately represent what they believe. They don’t offer a party platform. They offer a proposition based on principles and evidence, choosing policies that best fit the community they serve.

In the agile world, the certification that best represents the left-leaning independent is ICAgile.

Now before we go too deeply, Daniel and I should acknowledge our relationship with respect to ICAgile. We both have a long association with the certification as founding partners and have dedicated much of our careers to what this certification set out to achieve. We have done our best to apply the same honesty here that we have brought to the rest of the series, but some bias might prevail.

The International Consortium for Agile was founded in 2010 by Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D and Alistair Cockburn, an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto. Their founding proposition was radical for its time: agile is not a process, a methodology, or a framework. It is a mindset, described by four values, defined by twelve principles, and manifested through an unlimited number of practices. ICAgile was the first certification body to build its entire certification architecture around this approach. It was designed explicitly to strip away any prescriptive approaches and invite participants to adopt agile in their context. ICAgile is the “choose your own adventure” story in the spectrum.

So who is ICAgile’s political counterpart?

As our values-driven and deliberately non-prescriptive agile certification, ICAgile maps to left-leaning independents, the credible crossbenchers who sit outside the major party structures, have deep expertise in their chosen discipline, and win on the strength of their knowledge and principles.

The parallels are immediate. Left-leaning independents don’t run on a party platform because a platform implies a fixed position regardless of context. Instead, they review the options, apply their expertise, and make policy decisions based on what their community actually needs. ICAgile works the same way. It accredited learning experiences against outcomes developed by thought leaders, and trusted facilitators to review the available approaches, apply their own expertise, and choose the practices that best suited their learners. Neither is making a bet on a single system. Both are making a bet on the quality of the judgement in the room.

Left-leaning independents also attract people of genuine substance. What draws them is rarely ambition for power, it is frustration that the existing options are failing the people they care about. Their constituents are not just voters; they are the community they have spent their professional lives serving. ICAgile attracted the same calibre of contributor. The thought leaders who built its learning tracks, Craig among them, brought genuine field experience to what they created. These were not theorists writing curriculum. They were practitioners who had lived the problems the learning was designed to address, and that credibility showed in the quality of what the best facilitators delivered.

One of the most compelling qualities of the left-leaning independent is the breadth of community they can serve. Unconstrained by party ideology, they are free to work across the aisle, drawing on whatever evidence and expertise the situation demands. Their values are progressive, but their reach is not limited to the left. ICAgile operates the same way. Grounded in a progressive, mindset-first philosophy, its certification was never the exclusive territory of product-led organisations or transformation advocates. Practitioners working in heavily governed, project-based environments found ICAgile equally valuable, because values and principles are transferable regardless of context. A conservative organisation and a progressive one can both benefit from genuine agile understanding. The method they choose to apply it through is simply a different chapter of the same adventure.

There is a challenge that comes with being an independent that party politicians rarely face in the same way. Without a machine behind them, left-leaning independents can spread themselves across too many issues, developing a view on everything and a focused mandate on nothing. The community expects breadth, but the work demands focus. ICAgile faced an equivalent tension. The curriculum expanded steadily across the years, reaching into coaching, leadership, product ownership, DevOps, and business agility, each addition driven by genuine expertise and real demand. But breadth created a maintenance problem. Learning outcomes that had been developed by some of the finest practitioners in the field began to age, and the pace of updates did not match the pace at which the discipline was moving. What had once felt current started to feel like it was describing a conversation from several years earlier. There was also a structural constraint that compounded this: every certification had to fit within a deliverable of two or more days to qualify, which worked well for standalone learning but became a genuine hindrance when organisations needed bespoke, modular transformation programs that didn’t map neatly to that format. The architecture that had once been liberating had quietly become a limitation.

For practitioners, ICAgile’s foundational certification remains one of the most intellectually honest starting points in the market. It grounds people in the thinking behind agility rather than the mechanics of performing it. Because the learning is anchored in values and principles rather than prescribed practices, it has an inherent flexibility that method-specific certifications simply cannot offer. Practitioners are not taught one way to do something. They are equipped to think about why agility works, which means the application of that learning can evolve as the field evolves, as their organisation matures, and as their context demands. For organisations, understand what you are investing in: practitioners who can think, adapt, and choose the right approach for their context, rather than practitioners who can only perform a prescribed one.

Left-leaning independents rarely form government. Their value is not in the machinery of power but in the quality of thinking they bring to the room, and in their willingness to hold a position on principle when the major parties are playing politics. ICAgile’s most enduring contribution is exactly that: it said, early and clearly, that agile is a mindset and that the values and principles that define it can be applied in any context, through any practice, by any team willing to genuinely understand them. No method required. No platform necessary. Just the conviction that the right answer should follow the evidence and the context, not the other way around.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the series is PMI, IIBA, ISTQB and the Right-Leaning Independents.

Please note: This is article 6 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:

1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents

A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.

Every political spectrum has its quietly effective parties. Not the idealists demanding systemic overhaul. Not the establishment parties jostling for the centre. But the movements that do serious, disciplined work, build a loyal following, and somehow never quite break through to the mainstream because a louder, more charismatic neighbour took all the air out of the room.

In the agile certification world, that party is Kanban.

Ask most practitioners if they ‘use Kanban’ and a majority will say yes. Ask them whether they actively limit work in progress, track flow metrics, use service level expectations, or practice evolutionary change discipline and the numbers drop sharply.

David J. Anderson, who pioneered the Kanban Method for knowledge work, has himself declared “Kanban is ubiquitous, it’s time to declare victory.” And in one sense, he’s right. Kanban boards are everywhere however the Kanban Method is far less common than you might think. That gap, between widespread adoption of the surface and shallow understanding of the substance, is precisely what makes Kanban one of the most underappreciated certifications on our Agile Political Spectrum.

Kanban’s roots stretch back to post-war Japan and the Toyota Production System, not as ideology, but as operational discipline. The original Kanban was a signalling card used to trigger replenishment in a pull-based production line. No manifesto. No cultural revolution. A control mechanism designed to reduce inventory risk and improve flow.

When Anderson introduced the Kanban Method to knowledge work in the mid-2000s, he was deliberate about what it was and wasn’t. He made the positioning explicit from the outset: start with what you do now, respect current roles and responsibilities, and pursue incremental, evolutionary improvement.

Kanban does not require new roles, it does not demand reorganisation or assume that hierarchy must be dismantled. Instead, it asks organisations to visualise their work, limit work in progress, measure flow, manage risk, and improve gradually over time. This is not structural reform. It is structural preservation combined with operational discipline.

Over time, Kanban matured into a serious professional discipline. Kanban University formalised the certification pathway, building a rigorous body of knowledge around flow metrics, service-level expectations, probabilistic forecasting, and the Kanban Maturity Model. The emphasis was never on ceremonies or team rituals. It was on service delivery systems and organisational capability.

So who is Kanban’s political counterpart?

As our right-of-centre, disciplined, and chronically underrated agile certification, Kanban maps to the Australian Democrats.

The Australian Democrats were a centrist party founded in 1977, best known for holding the balance of power in the Senate and their rallying cry: “keeping the bastards honest.” At their peak they wielded influence well beyond their vote share, doing serious legislative work while louder voices on both sides dominated the headlines.

The parallels with Kanban are immediate and striking.

Both built serious, rigorous bodies of knowledge and operated with genuine discipline. Both accumulated loyal, knowledgeable followings that punched above their weight in terms of real-world influence. And both were ultimately drowned out, not because their ideas were wrong, but because a louder movement captured the room.

Against the noise of certification ecosystems that scaled aggressively through the 2000s and 2010s, Kanban University’s comparatively modest global network barely registers. And yet, in organisations that genuinely implement it, the Kanban Method consistently delivers improved flow, reduced risk, greater predictability, and a cleaner picture of organisational capacity.

The Democrats were never trying to win government. They were trying to make the system work better. Kanban was never trying to replace whatever else was in the room. It was trying to improve how work flows through whatever system already exists. Both found meaningful influence in that role. Neither got the recognition their contribution deserved.

Kanban boards have become so ubiquitous that many practitioners genuinely believe they are “doing Kanban” simply by moving cards across columns in a tool or on a physical whiteboard. Far fewer implement WIP limits with discipline. Fewer still track cycle time, use probabilistic forecasting, or develop capability in flow analytics. The Kanban Maturity Model, one of the more thoughtful frameworks for understanding organisational development in the agile world, is largely unknown outside the Kanban community itself.

This creates a peculiar market dynamic. Kanban suffers not from bad press, but from misrepresentation by familiarity. Nobody declares Kanban adoption a failure. They just assume they’re already doing it. The certification therefore struggles to communicate its genuine depth to a market that thinks it already knows what Kanban is.

The agile world generated years of passionate debate, consultant wars, and certification inflation around louder frameworks, which paradoxically gave them more visibility. Kanban slipped in the back door, got implemented on whiteboards everywhere, and then got largely forgotten as a serious discipline.

Kanban sits on the right-conservative side of our Agile Political Spectrum, but in a particular way. It is not conservative because it adds bureaucracy or resists change. It is conservative because it genuinely respects existing structures and pursues improvement within them rather than demanding their replacement.

This makes Kanban valuable in a range of contexts that more progressive certifications struggle to serve. For teams operating in complex, highly regulated, or politically sensitive environments where structural redesign is simply not on the table, Kanban offers a credible, evidence-based path to improvement. For leaders who need to demonstrate results without triggering a governance revolt, Kanban’s language of flow, throughput, and risk is far more accessible than the vocabulary of transformation.

For organisations genuinely committed to a product operating model and cultural transformation, Kanban may feel insufficient on its own, though it often becomes essential as a delivery discipline within that broader journey. The ability to visualise and manage flow doesn’t become less important once you’ve reorganised around products. It becomes more important.

If you are an organisation wondering whether Kanban ‘counts’ as agile, or whether it’s just a board tool, the answer is that the board is the least interesting part. The discipline underneath it is where the value lives.

The Australian Democrats may no longer exist as a political party. Their legacy, however, is woven into the fabric of Australian legislative history in ways that rarely get acknowledged. Kanban risks a similar fate, its ideas absorbed into every tool and methodology without credit, its depth largely undiscovered.

Like a good Democrats senator, Kanban won’t promise you a revolution. But it will make the system you already have work considerably better. If you are attempting to reduce waste, bottlenecks and the invisible work quietly choking your organisation then Kanban might be just what you need in keeping the bastards honest.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the series is ICAgile and the Left-Leaning Independents.

Today ‘agile’ is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.

This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at showing how public sector organisations can support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.

Presenters, Craig Smith an Enterprise Agile Coach and Consultant from SoftEd, and Julian Smith, Head of Agile Practice for Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency, will provide an interesting and informative view of how agility can be applied in the public sector and will introduce the Government Agility Model, a framework that you can use to assess where to apply agility in your agency.

Craig is based in Australia and works extensively with the Australian Public sector and as a member of the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, brings a global perspective.

Julian is a digital leader and entrepreneur who specialises in public sector agility. He is experienced in lean-agile policy development, digital transformation, user-centred design and digital technology.

This will be an interactive session, so please be prepared to share your own experiences as well as introducing and encouraging anyone that wants to bring agility to their department or agency to attend the session.

Many thanks to Andy Cooper for inviting myself and Julian to present this session.

COVID-19 was the biggest driver of culture change in the last year

COVID-19 was the largest influence of change in the culture and methods space in 2020 and the knock on effects in 2021 are driving many of the trends we see at this time.  The previous trends report was released early in the pandemic and we now have a year’s worth of content to explore how the IT world has adapted and responded. There have been many examples of great collaboration, teamwork and adapting to new ways of working along with plenty of stories of hardship, Zoom Fatigue, mental and physical health challenges and other impacts as people have adapted to working from home, managers have changed long-held beliefs about remote work and organisations have adopted new technologies to support the shift.

Source: Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2021

Source: Engineering Culture Trends Report – March 2021

Today ‘agile’ is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.

This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.

Deepti Jain and the team did an excellent job putting together this month long festival and it was also a pleasure to be part of the Advisory Board.