I will go as far as to say that I beleive it's impossible for a company to actually acheive anything like "Agile" as long as their budgeting process looks anything remotely like the traditional budgeting ways. I also find it telling that the companies that I heard the most "Agile is working well for us" stories from were those awash with investor money and in "startup mode" with relatively little pressure to deliver net revenue on a quarterly basis, just to delight customers and increase market size and share at a breakneck speed.

This isn't a criticism of Agile per se, but it's an observation that companies hewing to the traditional cycles of quarterly and yearly "here's the money you have to spend" and "what did we get for that money we gave you?" aren't going to be able to be Agile in any effective manner. Agile by it's very nature isn't going to show up with a bullet point list of budget line items with money spent and the revenue generated and the profit margin of each individual investment.

Likewise - as someone who's spent much (most?) of their career in professional services orgs, I don't even know how those engagements can work can actually be Agile. Sure, they can do Scrums and sprints DevOps, but be Agile? NO WAY. It's contractually imposible, unless it's a pure staff aug relationship to a company that is truly Agile! Why? That contract has defined budget, defined start/stop dates, defined deliverables, and on and on and on. How are you going to be Agile like that? It was a Waterfall project from the very beginning. But as an industry, we've conflated "using Jira, two week sprints, and DevOps" with "Agile".

J.Ja