Progress Reporting

A correspondent on the Your Questions Answered topic posed this interesting question:

This is all very well and interesting, but how can I use this to maximise my consultancy fees whilst still doing nothing other than sitting at my laptop and reporting back to the MD at regular intervals?
The answer, of course, is in progress reporting. While it goes against the grain of a lightweight "agile" process to have extensive reporting, it is vital for an "Agile" process to put emphasis on reporting the right things to management. This can be explained with the following scenario:

Boss I need help running my company.
Agilista Agile is the way.
Boss I need to see progress.
Agilista Oh you will.

later...

Boss How is it going?
Agilista Look at all this progress [produces semi-intelligible data with plenty of buzzwords].
Boss I don't understand it.
Agilista Ah, well, you're not meant to understand it all. Some of it is internals from the process. Do you recognise its existance?
Boss ... er... well... it's right here
Agilista And do you see its magnitude?
Boss though I'm uncertain of the units, yes I do.
Agilista Then there's been plenty of progress, which is good. You do understand don't you?
Boss [not wanting to look stupid] Well, if you put it like that.

And so, progress reporting is the lifeblood of your business. If you don't report progress, then there has been no progress. Conversely, and this is the good bit, any progress you report is seen as a success of the process, whether or not it would have happened anyway. This, coupled with the other maxim that if you break down the progress report into chunks of a tenth of the size, the progress looks to have increased tenfold, means that you are, quite literally, laughing.

Is that all?
Nearly. The whole purpose of Agile is to manage expectations. Everything you do must be in support of the expectations you want on you. So, if you want a cushy job where you spout occasional bits of dogma, leave the team to get on with the nonsensical self-conflicting process, and then claim their every success as proof of your value-add, you must manage things carefully.

Set the tempo of your relationship with management carefully. If you come in promising quick returns on day one, speaking quickly and enthusiastically, then you will be giving them rope enough to hang you. If you act quickly in conversation, then people expect you to act quickly in everything, and produce actual tangible results quickly. Conversely, if you seem desperately slow and sluggish then people will assume that you're not very bright and will not trust you. However, if you speak at a moderate pace, and leave big pregnant pauses in between, people will assume that you're bright but thoughtful. Try to be dry, deadpan and slightly dull too. This will counterpoint with the common-sense/flaming-obvious that you say when you are speaking, making you seem even brighter. Also throw in some redefinitions of well understood concepts to ensure that people are never quite sure whether they understand you, but dare not challenge your definitions lest you prove them wrong in an apparently patient-yet-really-exasperated manner.

Your behaviour sets the expectations, so from your steady, but not sluggish, and sometimes-intimidating taciturn exterior, even the slightest of achievements will seem like not only big progress, but also big progress born out of powerful common sense.

Don't crack a smile, it takes 10% off your fees.

Sitting at the laptop
Get the on-site IT people to provide you with a net connection for internet and email. Ensure that you tell the team that email is muda, so they can't email you and catch you off-guard as you spend the entire day on yours. If you can piss the team off so that they don't really want to ask for your help, lest you change yet another aspect of their working environment, then you have an excuse to charge money to sit in the corner undisturbed, claiming the results of the people who want to leave you alone as proof of why you should do it some more.