For the purposes of the discussion I define a "project" as a management structure with a start date, and end date, a budget and a goal. (It says "goal", but subsequent scribbling makes it look as if it says "goat", prompting one of my colleagues to quip: pick which one you want to sacrifice!)
My contention is that when people talk about managing Agile work they generally mean Scrum or these days Kanban (or something very much like them) and that these techniques talk mainly about the steady state of product development and how to control that. They have relatively little to say about what happens at the beginning of a "project". How to get one signed off, for example. Kanban seems particularly weak on this. Nor what happens at the end of a "project" when a set of features go into production. Scrum seems particularly weak on that. As a side note, when I first started working with banks it took me a long time to properly grasp that when they talk about the "delivery" phase of a project they don't mean the relatively trivial bit at the front where the programmers write code.
So, the conclusions of the group were that projects exist as a management structure to mitigate a certain kind of risk in a certain way. As such, I would not agree with this tweet (in reply to one I sent about the very session:
The concept [of a project] is superfluous as it does not add business value.
the concept seems to persist as (some people) believe that having projects allows them to protect money. They might be mistaken: thinking about risk in software development is often wrong, but the idea of a project cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The group observed that different stakeholders have different concerns at different size and time scales, and these are nested. Scrum and Kanban talk mostly about the innermost few layers of the onion.
There was a concrete recommendation: when communicating from the inner part of the onion (smaller scale, shorter time frame) to the outer, do not talk about "iterations" or "cadence" or much of anything time based. Talk about money: pay something in this range, get something in that range.
