The scope of Agile 2 is all human endeavors that require multiple people. This includes but is not limited to the development and support of capabilities (products, services, and enabling systems) that deliver business value or mission value.
Unlike the original Agile Manifesto, Agile 2 is not limited to the scope of software development. It does not claim to address every problem that arises in every human endeavor, but the intention is to develop a set of principles and insights that apply in a wide range of situations. Judgment is called for whenever any of these are applied. The greatest misuse is to blindly apply a principle or insight without considering the context. In some cases, we attempt to identify the tradeoffs that might guide someone in determining if a principle applies.
In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, the only answer that is always right is, “it depends.”
Why We Chose This Scope
This scope is much more expansive than the Agile Manifesto, which was specifically intended for software development.
The application of Agile ideas has spread beyond the domain of software, and so it is not up to us whether Agile 2 will be applied in other fields. We decided to accept that the de-facto scope of Agile is much larger than what the authors of the original Agile Manifesto intended. The reality is that Agile ideas are being used in pretty much every domain, and for every situation that involves multiple people, because Agile is fundamentally about how people work together.
Therefore, in order to address the actual scope in which Agile ideas are being applied, we have explicitly taken on the full breadth of human collaborative situations.
That might seem like a lot, but an important point is that Agile 2 does not presume to answer every question. Agile 2 is a set of ideas – nothing more. Anyone who thinks that all of the answers to every human collaboration question are in Agile 2 will be disappointed, just as anyone who thought that the answer to every question about software development would be in the Agile Manifesto was surely also disappointed.
We hope that Agile 2 contains many of the answers that people seek.