Agile Project Management
Imagine producing an opera agile. Four weeks in: first sprint review. The audience takes their seats, expectant, dressed for a premiere—and gets… half a scene.
No overture. The set is a few painted cardboard boxes. The tenor launches into his great aria even though the soprano hasn’t been told yet that she’s supposed to die.
No worries, that’s in the next sprint.
Sounds absurd? It is. Because opera doesn’t work in bite-sized increments. Nobody wants to show up every month for an unfinished version and then hope the dress rehearsal will magically smooth out the chaos. An opera is a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—or it’s nothing at all.
Where Agile Actually Makes Sense
But don’t panic. There are plenty of projects where agile methods are pure gold—especially when you can incorporate feedback and improve step by step without ruining the whole experience.
Take an opera app, for example:
- Sprint 1: Season schedule overview
- Sprint 2: Feedback says: navigation is a maze → improve UX
- Sprint 3: Ticket booking
- Sprint 4: Streaming for performances you missed
That’s how something real grows: one increment at a time, but always usable. Each release is small, tangible, and—crucially—doesn’t require the user to “imagine the rest.”
If Wagner Had Composed with a Scrum Board…
Now picture Richard Wagner standing in front of a Scrum board.
- First release: Das Rheingold.
- Stakeholders demand “more drama,” so Die Walküre gets reworked and adds a few tragic heroes.
- Siegfried arrives with exciting new features—but in a completely different key.
- Götterdämmerung is cancelled because, frankly, everyone has lost interest.
What’s left is an audience quietly wondering whether they’ve walked into the wrong theatre—and whether the “product vision” was ever more than a magnificent hallucination.
Mozart’s Magic Flute as an MVP
Or take Mozart.
- Sprint 1: Three arias are finished, but Tamino still doesn’t have a flute.
- Sprint 2: Papageno gets his bells; the rest remains… atmospheric fog.
- Sprint 3: User feedback demands more drama, so the Queen of the Night gets a second aria.
- Sprint 4: Sarastro is cut—decision in a meeting: too long.
The result? A Magic Flute stitched together like a patchwork quilt: a little brilliance here, a little chaos there, and no one quite sure what the story is supposed to be.
Finale
Agile is wonderful—when it fits.
- For software, apps, and products? Ideal.
- For an opera that must land as one overwhelming whole? Not so much.
In other words: some projects are like arias. They have to be sung in a single breath.