Why Agile Transformation Often Fails?

Posted On July 11, 2020

Agile transformation is almost mandatory irrespective of company size due to market demand and to unlock faster value to customer.

Many survey and market study showed obvious advantage of Agile methodology ¹ over traditional project management. But agile transformation may go wrong in many ways. Your organization may be the victim of failed agile journey or legacy practice underneath with Agile wrapper.

I’ll start with one of my favorite quote as follows

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
Thomas A. Edison

I’ve summarized here top five reasons behind agile transformation failure among many others. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this article.

1. Anyway Force-fit Agile

Organization often try to force fit “one size fits all” approach to a whole company instead of identifying the right approach.

Let me give you an example. You will not get expected outcome³ if you use wrench to drive nails into wood or hammer to tighten & loosen nuts and bolts. Simple reason is because you’re trying with wrong tool.

Similarly imagine toolbox contains tools such as Agile Scrum, Kanban, Xtreme Programming (XP), Crystal, SAFe⁴, LeSS⁵ and Scrum@Scale⁶ etc. Now company often overlooked deciding factors such as business need, expected outcome, team dynamics, and organizational commitment while implementing Agile. Moreover, even within organization it’s important to find right size approach rather than forcing a rigid “one size fits all”.

So choosing right methodology is extremely important for successful Agile transformation. We often force fit Agile everywhere even when we need hammer not wrench for specific jobs to perform.

2. Ignored Organization Readiness

“Be the Change that you want to see in the world”
Mahatma Gandhi

Readiness to embrace any change is very important but organization often mandated Agile implementation and ignored this aspect. As a result, implementation of agile is just happening by conducting one big-bang agile training and then mandating some practices to fulfill market demands or organizational commitment.

Cultural and mindset change across Enterprise is extremely critical to bring agility. But how could organization bring that much, needed mindset change or how to measure it? There is neither shortcut answer nor quicker way to achieve cultural shift. It varies in each organization and leadership has to navigate potential way to bring and pursue changing habits and behavior long enough to feel the impact.

Organizations don’t allow enough time to adapt the needed change due to many organizational or enterprise factors hence Agile implementation fails.

3. Poor Alignment of Roles & Responsibilities

Organization has its own legacy hierarchy which sometimes difficult to break and disrupt to align with Agile roles and responsibilities. Often organization compromised with agile roles and responsibilities and middle ground to map them with legacy one. Same thing is applicable for process adaptation as well where mostly Agile implementation is failed.

Frequently either misunderstood or resistant to change to define true responsibilities of agile roles due to

unwillingness of coming out of legacy practice
simply lack of clarity
scare to give up common and control

These all are blocker for basic Agile mindset shift and determine the stage for failure.

4. Poor Execution by Top Leadership

Leadership Failure — Image Credit: Dilbert.com

Leadership made a decision to “Go Agile”, and mostly even adopt a particular agile methodology/framework. But then they delegated the execution of that plan fully and presumed it must happened elsewhere.

Leadership often delegated whole responsibility for implementing Agile and it’s mindset change to downward. And eventually that transformation responsibility solely landed on an agile coach, hired from outside who has limited understanding of organization. Therefor cultural impediments to Agile transformation will therefore pass through and be modified by the hierarchical legacy itself.

So, bottom line is that everyone either top-down or down-up has role to play in enterprise transformation and leadership has to make sure by breaking the hierarchy barrier.

5. Blind Metrics Dependency

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.”
Edward de Bono

Many times leadership only rely on Agile metrics to measure progress which is not always depict the real on the ground picture. You know most of the time organization don’t focus organic metrics. Many layer in the organization sometimes engineered metrics and shared across which definitely negatively impacts agile implementation.

Leadership isn’t measuring progress through empirical evidence², rather through the reports whatever expected by themselves. On top those reports are often modified & suppressed by each group and created real blocker to bring real change.

Therefore, the metrics what leadership are received about the ongoing transformation mostly blurred and distorted.

Closure

Organizations need to find compelling reason to change with clear vision and then find the right tool set to achieve expected outcome. Leadership commitment to pursue the cultural shift by motivating each team & individual is extremely critical.

Finally, organization should focus on right set of organic metrics to measure outcome.