This is the paper that was the basis of Scrum: The New New Product Development Game, Harvard Business Review, 1986. [1].
The crux of the paper is that you should be "grouping teams by product, not role, and figuring out an interdisciplinary way to work together, rather than running the entire team by the methodology of one specialty".
If the word "Agile" freaks you out, then by all means don't call it that. And certainly there are a lot of bullshit artists plying their trade out there. Indeed, if someone tells me they are "Agile", by default I don't believe them. But as this 1986 paper shows, there is a lot of good data and good theory out there if you but look.
The crux of the paper is that you should be "grouping teams by product, not role, and figuring out an interdisciplinary way to work together, rather than running the entire team by the methodology of one specialty".
If the word "Agile" freaks you out, then by all means don't call it that. And certainly there are a lot of bullshit artists plying their trade out there. Indeed, if someone tells me they are "Agile", by default I don't believe them. But as this 1986 paper shows, there is a lot of good data and good theory out there if you but look.
[1] http://www.sao.corvallis.or.us/drupal/files/The%20New%20New%...