A client asks for a fixed price. The vendor writes a spec, quotes a number, and both sides sign it feeling like they’ve eliminated risk. Six weeks in, the client wants a feature that wasn’t in the spec, the vendor calls it a change order, and the relationship that started as a handshake is now a negotiation over what “originally scoped” meant. That’s not a fixed price project gone wrong. That’s what most fixed price projects actually look like once real requirements meet a document written before anyone had built anything.

The “agile is dead” argument appears on a reliable cycle, usually authored by someone who spent years watching organizations adopt the ceremonies, terminology, and org charts of agile while preserving the planning assumptions, reporting structures, and risk culture of waterfall. The frustration is legitimate. The conclusion is wrong. What failed in most organizations was not agile. It was a management consulting product that appropriated agile vocabulary while systematically removing the practices that give agile its value.