The Machine Meets Its Match: Eric Kimberling’s Welcome to the Machine and PRINCE2 Agile Version 2

PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 gives buyers a practical defence against weak governance, bad timelines, vendor lock-in and AI-driven complexity.

Pink Floyd wrote "Welcome to the Machine" about the music industry chewing up the naive. Eric Kimberling borrowed the title for his 2026 book about digital transformation, which turned out to be the third act of this summer's holiday reading, the same suitcase that carried Drucker's The Practice of Management, and the subject of the two previous PDCA blogs. The casting works uncomfortably well, except in his version, the machine is the trillion-dollar ecosystem of software vendors, system integrators and analyst firms, and the naive newcomer is your organisation, arriving with a signed contract and a press release about its transformation ambitions.

Kimberling's numbers set the stage: by his account, somewhere between 55 and 75 per cent of enterprise software implementations fail, the average cost overrun runs to 189 per cent, and only one ERP project in four is judged a success by the organisation that paid for it. Those figures haven't improved in three decades, and his conclusion is the uncomfortable one: this isn't bad luck, it's a business model. Reading it as a PRINCE2 Agile trainer, I kept having the same reaction on page after page: there's a control for that. So this blog puts Kimberling's diagnosis next to PRINCE2 Agile Version 2, the 2025 edition built on the PRINCE2 7 base, and checks how the method answers the machine.

In this blog, we'll explore:

• The eighteen-month lie, and why stage boundaries are scheduled honesty
• Bait-and-switch staffing, and what eleven named roles do to it
• Knowledge hostage tactics, and a method that assumes you're building your own capability
• The rigged scoreboard, and the questions the Agilometer asks before you sign anything
• AI-driven lock-in, and why the new syllabus saw it coming

The eighteen-month lie

Scheduled honesty beats heroic forecasting

Kimberling's first exhibit is the timeline sold at the pitch: the confident eighteen-month plan that everyone in the room privately knows is fiction, priced to win the deal and renegotiated once you're too committed to leave. The lie works because the buyer commits everything up front against a forecast nobody will be held to.

PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 refuses the premise. Manage by stages means the organisation commits in instalments, planning in detail only the stage it can actually see, with a genuine go or no-go decision at each boundary. Progress iteratively with feedback then fills each stage with working increments rather than promises, and a release map shows what's actually landing and when. A boundary every few months where the business re-decides, on evidence, whether to continue is scheduled honesty, and it's remarkable how quickly an eighteen-month fiction collapses when it has to survive its first stage assessment.

The bait and switch

Eleven named roles versus the vanishing A-team

Kimberling's second tactic is staffing: the sales cycle is conducted by the integrator's finest, and delivery is conducted by whoever was available. The stars who won your confidence dissolve at contract signature, replaced by a rotating cast learning your industry at your expense.

The counter is the least glamorous principle in the method and the one I'd nail to every programme office wall: define roles, responsibilities, and relationships. PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 names eleven roles, from project executive and senior supplier down through chief product owner, product owner, agile coach, team coach, developer and tester, and the senior supplier sits on the project board, personally answerable for the delivery resources they committed. When the people are named in the project organisation rather than implied in a proposal, the switch stops being a quiet substitution and becomes a formal change with a face attached. The distinction between the chief product owner (who owns the project backlog) and the product owners (who own product backlogs) does similar work on the customer side: accountability with names on it, all the way down.

Held hostage by your own system

The method that assumes you're building capability

The tactic Kimberling calls knowledge hostage-taking is the machine's pension plan: the integrator configures everything, documents little, and departs with the only working knowledge of your own system, guaranteeing an aftermarket of dependency that outlasts the project by a decade. His remedy is blunt, build internal capability rather than renting it forever.

Here Version 2 is genuinely stronger than its predecessor. People is one of the five integrated elements inherited from the PRINCE2 7 base, and the new edition surrounds it with organisational change management, co-creation, and the growth mindset, plus two coaching roles, the agile coach working across the organisation and the team coach embedded with one or two delivery teams, whose entire purpose is transferring capability into your people rather than performing agility at them. A project that runs learn from experience properly, and staffs those roles from the client side, ends the project knowing how its own system works. The hostage-takers need the opposite, which tells you exactly how hard to insist.

The rigged scoreboard

Justification, assurance, and six sliders of pre-contract honesty

Kimberling's larger point is systemic: a circular economy of conflicts of interest in which the firms rating the software are funded by the firms selling it, and nobody inside the machine profits from telling you to stop. The project equivalent is the status report that stays green while the delivery turns red, because everyone reporting is invested in continuation.

PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 builds its counter-machine from three parts. Ensure continued business justification forces the stopping question onto the agenda at every stage boundary, in writing. Project assurance answers to the board independently of the project manager, which is precisely the independence Kimberling finds missing in the analyst ecosystem. And before any of that, the Agilometer runs six sliders across the project, flexibility on what is delivered, level of collaboration, ease of communication, ability to work iteratively and deliver incrementally, environmental conditions, and acceptance of agile, asking whether agile delivery actually suits this project before anyone commits. The machine sells the same transformation to everyone; the Agilometer is the instrument that's allowed to say no.

The machine learns to use AI

And so does the syllabus

Kimberling's forward warning is that AI will deepen vendor lock-in unless organisations act deliberately to prevent it, the machine's next upgrade, with your data as the switching cost. Version 2, to its credit, arrived ready for the conversation: the syllabus now includes an explicit learning outcome on using AI to support PRINCE2 Agile, alongside guidance that reaches beyond the project into agile product management and operations. A method that teaches its practitioners to treat AI as a governed capability, inside the same controls as everything else, is a method that read the same warning Kimberling did.

How not to get processed

The informed buyer's method

Kimberling insists his book isn't about despair but about realism, the machine will persist, and the job is to avoid being processed by it. I'd sharpen that for project people: the informed buyer he wants to create already has a method available, and it's been examinable since May 2025. Every tactic in his catalogue works best on an organisation with no stage boundaries, no named roles, no independent assurance and no standing question about justification. PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 installs all four, then adds the agile delivery the vendors promised and rarely define. If you're commissioning a transformation this year, read Kimberling for the threat model and bring the method as the countermeasure, because the machine has a playbook and now you do too. It also closes this summer's accidental trilogy rather neatly: Drucker packed the timeless principles, Kimberling packed the reasons you'll need them, and the sun lounger critic next to mine has formally given up on my holiday reading.