Actions over Manifestos

Living up to your standards is more important than expressing your intentions

Via Bob Galen (thanks for the mention, I feel flattered!) I came across the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility - published by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Now, I am never afraid of a bit of theory and enjoy a good reading to see what I can get out of it. (See for instance my thoughts on the LeSS Version of the Scrum Guide.)

For those who were unaware of this new manifesto, let’s do an experiment! First, read it for yourself. Then try to answer these questions:

• Who is the target audience?

• Who should do this? CEOs?

• What is supposed to change with this document?

• What could have been written only now?

• What is the self-commitment?

• What X is more important than Y?

• What will fundamentally change in project management?

• What long-cherished view or behavior are we willing to sacrifice?

• What do we want to preserve?

• What is edgy, controversial, challenging the orthodoxy?

• If we embrace this notion of enterprise agility: What does it mean for the profession of project management?

If your answers are “I don’t know” or “nothing”, welcome to the club! (If, however, you got something out of it, please tell me!)

This manifesto comes across as a feel-good document for navel gazing. The prominent names and the long list of authors are a good fit for this purpose.

I fail to see any “call to action” or “break with tradition”. The basic assumptions of project management - plan, keep on track, push, escalate; siloes, phases, gates - remain in place.

Everybody can say “yes, yes” and then move on to do the same thing again. We are the good ones. Others have to change.

Reusing the picture of agility and healthy weight, imagine a diet coach and a former pupil saying: “Many people want to lose weight and be fit. We tell you in broad terms what you have to do.” This is not motivating.

This feels like a vanity project, not intended to be actually executed. Who has the illusion that it will change anything?

Careful, however, with one judgement: Bad document does not equal bad persons. There are some people quoted and involved that I deeply respect: Colleen Johnson, CEO of prokanban.org, and Daniel S. Vacanti, certainly not afraid of delivering tough messages or challenging “conventional wisdom”. Both have spent years “building bridges, not walls”. I go with the assumption of positive intent - it is better to influence the PMI with the notion of Flow than to slam doors.

Nevertheless, it feels strange to read a manifesto where the praise is already baked in. This document does not challenge, disturb, irritate anybody. Contrast this to the original Agile Manifesto: It was written in the spirit of creating an umbrella to unite all kinds of approaches coming from the work trenches built out of practice, not from a self-declared think tank. PMI’s “manifesto” expresses an attempt to control what is by nature uncontrollable. Contained agility is no agility.

A well-established, traditional institution is using terms that are commonly associated to revolutionary thinking... what could be going on? It reminds me of theater and the corporate immune system! The organizational immune system reacts with an immunity response, one antibody being the statement “we are already doing this” without changing anything.

In episode 117 of the No-Nonsense Agile Leadership Podcast called “Break out of the software factory”, Murray Robinson compares traditional management to the aristocracy before the revolution, and he comes to a similar conclusion:

“The aristocracy [in the senior management] is not going to change unless they are forced to cause they might lose their power and their wealth and their privilege. Agile is a big change like that but what’s better if you are the aristocracy is just to use the word without actually changing anything. And that’s what corporate agile is for most places.” (37:55-38:12)

Now, it would be easy to just file this under: “Nothing else was possible. What did you expect?” I am more of an optimist here, convinced that accepting this would be aiming too low.

First, for those people thinking that “there is nothing wrong with project management in software development”: Listen to the podcast that I mentioned before. It is from the 20th of February 2025. This is about one year before PMI’s manifesto, but it feels like worlds apart. As I described the episode when recommending it to colleagues:

While I like this podcast in general, this specifically is one of its best episodes so far. Murray Robinson talks so much about the painful reality of software development and I laughed a lot. Without aiming at it, this is an ultra-condensed version of the whole podcast series. It summarizes so many lessons of what works, so many long-standing problems in the software industry, so many dead-end streets. With all the openly shared bad news, it is optimistic. (I am obviously not alone with this attitude!)

Second, you might say, ok, there are problems, but “you cannot change the ways of a project manager”. Well, keep in mind how many agile practitioners are “reformed” project managers. If you want a concrete example of finding more up-to-date, adequate ways of thinking and working, listen to Johanna Rothman: Apart from Flow Metrics, one of my favorite topics of the last years, she stresses the necessity of management teams having shared goals. Otherwise, why would they work together - or anybody under them?

Third, the argument could go, alright, people can change, but “you cannot challenge project management from within”. How this can be done I mentioned just last week.

The podcast already mentioned twice has an interesting backstory. What Murray Robinson says is based on a similar talk he gave to the PMI institute Agile group. Amongst others, he told his audience that 90% of them who think that they are working in an agile way are not. What they are doing instead is executing long-running projects in “Sprints” - agile window dressing, as I would call it. In other words, you can be disruptive and deliver tough messages in the PMI environment.

As a last thought, is the problem that manifestos are out of fashion anyway? To the contrary: They can be documents that serve as important carriers of information. Because of that, manifestos are still popular.

The challenge is a totally different one: Manifestos are not hard to write. Writing a lasting one is.

Of course, there are two that definitely have had a lasting impact:

• Manifesto of the Communist Party / The Communist Manifesto (1848)

• Manifesto for Agile Software Development / The Agile Manifesto (2001)

(As a native speaker of Esperanto, I also know the Manifesto of Rauma (1980) and the Manifesto of Prague (1996). What you know depends on your culture...)

Have you ever heard of the Silicon Valley Product Group Manifesto? Marty Cagan introduced it in 2006, in an article titled “The Product Manifesto”. This was at a time when the Agile Manifesto was very hip. Seems like something like a Product Manifesto has not really taken off. Not everything can be a hit.

The appetite for writing manifestos is unbroken: Just about two months ago, the Product Mastery Conference 2026 took place in the office where I am working. One of the activities aimed at writing the “AI Manifesto”. I was not there, so let’s see how this one goes.

Ok, I foresee the potential criticism: Marty Cagan or product leaders trying to write a manifesto - isn’t this another flavor of “the people in power trying to imitate the rebels”?

Well, I have a last addition to the collection that is different. Lately, I discovered by chance that there is a Product Engineer Manifesto. Written by Viljami Kuosmanen, it is short, contains a call to action, and mentions the pain. In other words, it beats most of what has been published as a manifesto after 2001. I suppose it is relatively new - there is an additional document from August 2025.

Do not believe me. Read it for yourself. Ask the same set of questions that I posted at the beginning (replace “project management” with “software development” and “enterprise agility” with “product engineer”). Look how much your answers differ.

Of course, if I read what is now considered a “Product Engineer”, that also brings up some personal grief. That was what a good software developer was 30 years ago! How could we ever allow the image of our profession to degenerate into order-taking code monkeys? And that is the unrest that an impactful document brings.

A good manifesto has its authors showing how they live up to its spirit. Everyone can has big ambitions - making them come true through own actions is rare.

The Corrs: Rebel Heart