#1 Reason Why AGILE Implementations Fail
Gordon Tredgold Globally Ranked Leadership Expert
Global Gurus Top Leadership Expert, Coach and Speaker - "RESULTS BASED LEADERSHIP"
Agile is an excellent philosophy and the benefits it can bring to organisations can be substantial.
The challenge is, that many companies see AGILE is a change in development philosophy. While that is true, it also requires a change management and leadership philosophy and if you do not address this, then it’s likely your implementation will fail and you will not achieve the benefits that AGILE promises.
AGILE require a change from a command and control, a day-to-day management approach to a more servant leadership approach.
For AGILE to be successful you need to have a management team that is courageous enough, confident enough and mature enough to make this change.
It’s not an easy change to make because many of us are taught management methodologies that focus on control, regular progress checks, management meetings and management decision making.
AGILE require leadership to give up a significant level of control, to delegate decision making to the teams regarding what will be delivered, how it will be delivered and when it will be delivered, and take a role of serving the development teams.
Servant leadership is a very powerful approach to leadership it looks to empower teams, encourage ownership and drive accountability all of which are needed to successfully drive the culture change – at all levels – which is needed for AGILE to be successfully implemented.
If you want to implement an AGILE Development philosophy, make sure that you have a clear plan and commitment to implement an AGILE Leadership philosophy too!
Experienced manager and attorney
6 年If you are going to empower teams within your organization, that means you need to trust and support them.? You can't say you' are empowering them and then maintain complete control.? Selecting and trusting those teams in their areas is the crux of both servant leadership and the AGILE implementation.? Either you commit to trusting the team's decisions or you commit to dictating your decisions to them, but you cannot effectively do both. ?
Helping the world and companies with the Energy Transition
6 年Some good points, in particular how an agile leader is a servant to the teams not a manager. If you are a CTO your job is to remove roadblocks, make the business related decisions, help make technical choices, set the direction. If you simply make meetings, gantt charts, roadmaps, and micromanage your development teams then you are just a manger claiming to be agile.
Call Center Manager | Customer Relationship Management
6 年A change in mindset is required. Leadership must empower their direct reports!
Chief Technology Officer at QA Chef, Co-founder RiverGlide: An Agile Consultancy, Coach, Author, Developer, Mentor, Advocate
6 年It's not so much about giving up control as about understanding the difference between tactical and strategic goals. People misunderstand agile to mean faster, but it's actually about getting to what you needed faster (not necessarily what you asked for).? "Responding to change over following a plan" – Command and Control holds the micro-details of the plan to be immutable and will bitterly complain about reality refusing to play ball. Agile management will recognise that the planned path is blocked and understand that the team has elected to follow a divergent path that is, at least, moving us in the correct direction.