Agility, Scrum, SAFe: what they really change for your deadlines
The real problem: projects that deliver too late what you no longer need
You have probably lived through this situation: a project kicks off with an ambitious scope, announced deadlines, and an approved budget. Eighteen months later, the delivery arrives — but the market has shifted, your priorities have evolved, and what was built no longer quite matches what you need today.
This is not inevitable. It is the symptom of a way of working called the waterfall model: everything is defined upfront, built in isolation, and delivered at the end. Throughout the life of the project, you are in a tunnel. You spend, you trust, and you discover the result once it is (too) late to change course without starting over.
Agility was born precisely to solve this problem. Not to do good work in theory. To deliver sooner, better, and with fewer unpleasant surprises.
Scrum: the simple mechanics behind agility
Scrum is the most widely used agile framework. Its core principle is disarmingly simple: instead of delivering everything at the end, you deliver in small increments, regularly.
In practice, the team works in short cycles of two to four weeks, called sprints. At the end of each sprint, it demonstrates what has been built — a real demo, not a PowerPoint presentation. As an executive or decision-maker, you see the product progressing. You can validate, correct, or redirect.
What changes for you:
- You are no longer in the tunnel. You have regular visibility into actual progress, not just what was planned.
- You can change your mind without breaking everything. If a priority shifts, it is incorporated into the next sprint — not eighteen months from now.
- You fund value, not hours. At each cycle, what is delivered is functional and useful. You are not paying for a hypothetical final assembly.
Continuous prioritisation is one of the pillars of Scrum: at any given moment, the team is working on what delivers the most value to you. If something important surfaces along the way, it can move to the top of the list for the next sprint.
What this concretely changes for your deadlines and your risks
Agility does not perform miracles. It does not eliminate the complexity of a project. But it radically changes when you become aware of problems.
With a traditional approach, you discover issues at delivery. With agility, you detect them after two weeks.
That shift in timing is enormous. A bad surprise caught early costs little to fix. The same surprise discovered at the end of a two-year project can call the entire body of work into question.
On the budget side, the impact is direct: you can stop, pivot, or accelerate at any point based on what has actually been delivered. You do not discover at the end that 60% of the budget went to features nobody will use.
On the timeline side, frequent deliveries also allow you to put the most critical parts of your product or system into production sooner. You do not wait until the end of the project for your team to start deriving value from it.
SAFe: when multiple teams need to move forward together
Scrum works very well for a single team. But what happens when your transformation involves five, ten, or twenty teams that need to coordinate?
This is where SAFe — the Scaled Agile Framework — comes in. It is a way of organising agility at scale, preserving the benefits of Scrum while adding a coordination layer across teams.
In SAFe, multiple teams form an Agile Release Train: they move forward together at a common cadence, with shared objectives. Every two to three months, they come together for a PI Planning session — a collective planning event where each team presents what it can deliver, identifies its dependencies with other teams, and commits to shared goals.
For an executive, PI Planning is a key moment: in two days, you have a complete picture of what will be delivered over the next three months, with risks identified and trade-offs made collectively.
I have supported this type of initiative at Air Liquide (six teams, SAFe deployment, PI Planning) and at MGEN (Scrum Master for a data hub integrated into a SAFe train). In both cases, the primary value for leadership was the same: visibility, coherence, and regular deliveries without having to constantly arbitrate between teams.
The most common mistake: pretending to be agile
Agility has become a buzzword. Many organisations have adopted the vocabulary — sprints, backlogs, stand-ups — without changing the culture or the behaviours.
The result? Scrum on the surface, but the same old reflexes underneath: defining everything upfront, avoiding changes of direction, measuring progress in hours consumed rather than value delivered. You end up with the constraints of agility without its benefits.
This is where the role of an agile coach makes all the difference.
A good coach does not simply put up sticky notes and facilitate meetings. They work on habits, mindsets, and resistance to change. They support teams, but also managers and decision-makers, in how they engage with projects.
At Chanel in 2024, I supported two Scrum teams and the onboarding of 120 consultants to agility. The challenge was not technical — it was cultural. How do you get professionals accustomed to other methods to adopt new ways of working?
At Allianz Trade in 2021, combining the roles of PMO and agile coach, we overhauled project governance and achieved +40% in qualitative delivery within six months. Not because teams worked harder, but because they worked smarter — with better visibility, more rigorous prioritisation, and less friction in decision-making.
Agility is not a trend: it is a way to deliver sooner, with less risk
Over eleven years in IT, I have supported more than 25 teams and trained more than 350 people in agility across very different contexts — large industrial groups, mutual insurance companies, finance, and luxury. I have managed up to 110 people on an agile roadmap.
What I observe every time: the organisations that truly benefit from agility are those that have adopted it as a cultural shift, not as just another tool.
For an executive, the real promise of agility comes down to three things:
- You can see where your project stands, at all times.
- You can adapt your direction without starting over.
- You limit the impact of unpleasant surprises, because you detect them early.
This is the promise I commit to delivering for my clients — with the expertise of a large-group background and the closeness of a trusted partner.
Let's talk about your project
Are you steering a transformation, managing a complex project, or simply feeling like your deadlines are slipping away from you? Let's take 30 minutes to discuss it.
Dibrilou Diagne — Founder of Twenty, expert in agile project management and IT transformation
- WhatsApp: +33 6 34 42 50 56
- Email: contact@twentyconsultancy.com