In September 2013, a member of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee tried to sum up what had happened to Universal Credit, Britain’s plan to merge six benefits into one. The welfare department had built it using “agile,” a method that “had never really been done at this scale before.” Now, he understood, it had gone back to the old way. “In effect, they have ripped it up and started again.”
The interim director general of the government’s Major Projects Authority was also giving evidence. She said the programme was now using agile for some parts and a traditional approach for others, and that wasn’t the point. “It is not an issue of methodology; it is an issue of the rigour and discipline that is applied to those approaches.” The case has the rest.
Four preferences
Prefer working results and conversation to paperwork and fixed plans, but keep both.
In February 2001, seventeen software developers met at a ski lodge in Utah. They came from rival schools, including Extreme Programming, Scrum and DSDM, and agreed on four lines:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
“That is,” they added, “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.” The sentence is easy to skip, and it carries the weight. The Manifesto doesn’t throw out plans or documents. It says which one wins when they pull against each other. Jim Highsmith, one of the authors, wrote that the group was “not anti-methodology” and wanted “to restore a balance.”
Twelve principles came with it. Two matter most here: “Working software is the primary measure of progress,” and “Simplicity,” which the authors call “the art of maximizing the amount of work not done,”“is essential.”
The words without the preferences
Universal Credit adopted the name. The National Audit Office found the department had chosen agile in late 2010 so it could start building before the policy was settled. Read against the four preferences, the auditors’ findings look like this:
- Individuals and interactions. The programme grew to over 1,000 people, using “an approach that is often used in small collaborative teams.”
- Working software. The programme board could see measures of activity but “could not track the actual value of this activity against spending.”
- Customer collaboration. A PwC review found suppliers were paid for time and materials and that deliverables “were not always defined before contracts were signed,” a setup the review said left most of the risk with the department.
- Responding to change. The department held to a national launch in October 2013 that it couldn’t explain to the auditors, and in 2013 it abandoned that date.
The Cabinet Office, the NAO reported, did not consider that the department had “at any point prior to the reset appropriately adopted an agile approach.” The department then began building a new digital service in-house, again using agile. In September 2014 it passed the government’s first-stage check that it had a working prototype, though staffing problems had put it six months behind plan.
Imagine a five-person events company that starts holding a daily stand-up and calls itself agile. If the client still signs off a fixed list in January and sees nothing until the event in June, the meetings may change how the week feels without changing what the client gets.
Agile with AI
The Manifesto was written for software teams, but its preference for simple, working things carries over to building with AI. In a 2024 guide, Anthropic wrote that across dozens of teams building AI agents, “the most successful implementations weren’t using complex frameworks or specialized libraries. Instead, they were building with simple, composable patterns.” Its advice: “consider adding complexity only when it demonstrably improves outcomes.” That is close to the Manifesto’s simplicity principle, and to its measure of progress: whether the thing works.
The carry-over has limits. An agent is not a customer you can collaborate with, and a framework is not a bureaucracy. What transfers is the habit of asking whether a process or a tool is making the work better, or only making it look organized.
In 2013, the word “agile” was on a £2.2 billion government programme. By the auditors’ account, it had not yet adopted what the word stood for.