Overcoming the challenges facing adoption of agile practices
Have you tried to introduce, or are you trying to introduce, agile practices in your organisation? If so, how is it going?
There are a few organisations who have successfully implemented agile practices across their whole organisation; re-inventing the way they structure themselves, how they interact with and treat their staff, plan and direct their strategy, provide services to and support their customers, as well as how they deliver change (the traditional home ground of agile practices).
These organisations are the poster children for true agile transformation. However, that is not how most organisations experience it.
Many organisations implement agile practices in a development team and then have a really painful first release! Too often the response to this is “we tried agile and it didn’t work, let’s go back to what we know”, rather than the more mature and astute reaction of “that’s just one of the growing pains, let’s stick with it”.
Hopefully your organisation sticks with it, and some organisations that have find they achieve a degree of success in delivering quicker at relatively lower costs, and then find they cannot get above that point – all too often because the organisation’s programme management and governance process are still too linear and heavy-handed.
Why is this? What are the barriers, and how can we overcome them?
There have been a number of reports over the last year that have talked about the challenges facing the successful adoption and roll out of agile practices.
Most cite cultural issues to be the biggest barriers to adoption, whether a general resistance to change, an inability to shift the cultural mind-set, a lack of management support, and poor communication. Close second came fitting agile practices into a non-agile framework and the availability of people with the right skills.
The commonest reasons given for these challenges are that management feel they will lose control, they assume there will be less planning, less discipline, and no documentation.
So how do we overcome these barriers? What prepares an organisation for a successful agile transformation?
Agile transformations have been most successful when they clearly meet a need, are sponsored by senior management, and have an engaged uptake from those doing the work.
The biggest drag to agile adoption is middle management. They are too often motivated by trying to maintain the status quo, to cover their bases, and feel that agile practices are a huge challenge to their power base.
So, we could employ the pincer movement of driving this from top-down and bottom-up; however this is no guarantee that this will work and it’s not very people-centred.
Better yet it is to engage with middle management early on, help them see that agile practices lead to an enhanced sense of control (and accountability), more discipline, and more frequent (and therefore relevant) planning.
Alongside clear executive sponsorship, and middle management buy-in, the most prominent success factors for agile transformation include a progressive programme of instruction and mentoring, supported by an agile coach and a vibrant internal support group.
