10-years of Agility Barriers and Challenges - How to Resolve Them

I extracted the most recent 10-years of The State of Agile Report’s survey findings for Agile failures into an Excel workbook and produced a bar chart. These data are usually reported as “Agile Barriers and Challenges.” I wasn’t surprised at the resulting chart, but I was (and remain) disappointed.

The Top 3 Leading Causes: Culture, Resistance, and Professional Development (AKA, Training and Skills.) If you’ve worked at the enterprise-level (Agility or not), you’re aware that these three challenges are omnipresent yet often addressed positively, too. Successful organizations have committed to fostering improved conditions leading to a positive culture, less resistance (from all levels), and persistent professional development. (I’ve experienced this myself in multiple roles.) What are organizations adopting Agile or attempting Agile Transformation missing? I answer this question below.

Note: Leadership has only been included in the State of Agile Report survey for the past 2 years; too soon to indict that group! It’s also a copout to reflexively point to management and leadership as the root cause of conditions leading to poor Agility. Practitioners own their outcomes!

Top 5 Agile Barriers and Challenges

1. Organizational Culture
2. Resistance to Change
3. Agile Skills
4. Agile Training
5. Management Support

My own experience working with teams, programs, and organizations including management and leadership mirrors the Top 5. I’ve seen organizations succeed with Agility overcoming these impediments when they work in the following ways.

Organizational Culture

• Organizational Culture emerges as a side-effect of provisioning Agile teams and programs to succeed based on participants’ guidance and feedback.
• Guidance from consultants, senior leadership, and middle management is considered but not weighed as heavily as direct, candid participant feedback regardless of role and years of experience.
• As teams and programs succeed, supporting teams, groups, and vendor partners benefit from shorter Agile adoption and transformation cycles in pursuit of Business Agility.
• Business Agility culture is one outcome when organizations commit long-term and listen to teams.

Resistance to Change

• Resistance to Change is an outcome directly related to the other four barriers and challenges.
• It’s a euphemism for an organization’s lack of direct participant engagement in the strategy, planning, tailoring, and service delivery associated with Agile Adoption and Agile Transformation.
• How many times have you seen a handful of people distant from the work make key decisions? I see it on almost every client engagement.
• Resistance to Change can be subverted and kept at bay through a firm commitment to an emergent Organizational Culture (from team-level up, and from senior leadership, town) and an equally firm commitment to remediate the other three top barriers and challenges as described here.

Agile Skills & Agile Training

These are inextricably linked and must be addressed concurrently and per participant. Several Agile Myths must first be overcome or avoided:

• Myth 1 - We can send individuals and teams to Agile Training and expect they will be Agile Savvy (including proficiently practicing one or more Agile Frameworks) immediately upon their return.
• Myth 2 - We can transform Business Analysts into effective Product Owners and transform Project Managers into effective Scrum Masters as outcomes of a 2-day Agile Course.
• Myth 3 - We can expect Middle Managers to transform quickly from what is often years of command and control (overt or benign) to a hands-off, facilitative, and supportive role supporting emergent, self-organizing teams.
• Myth 4 - Successfully leading Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, and Agile Programs in pursuit of Business Agility will be an outcome of a 2-day Agile Leadership Course bundled with external Agile Coaching.
• Myth 5 - Agile is another Project Management methodology. We’ve been successful with projects in the past, and we can use the same personnel, the same working conditions, and set the same expectations for Agile.

Confronting and remediating these myths will set the stage for more effective Agile Professional Development. A lack of transparency and accountability in this area debilitates the opportunity to improve ROI and morale (AKA, culture.)

Management Support

• Management Support is often an afterthought (at best) especially when organizations focus almost exclusively on team-related activities including formation, frameworks, tools, roles, training, and metrics.
• In the early years of Agile Adoption, it WAS (primarily) all about the teams as scaling and transformation were not widely conceived, practiced, or attempted.
• In current times, management support based on tailored professional development at all levels of participatory management is fundamental for successful Agility.
• Agile scaling and transformation are now common strategic goals and prerequisites to organizational success in pursuit of Business Agility.
• Management makes this happen.

Management support including their direct participation (as facilitators and enablers) are prerequisites but not without the appropriate management training, coaching, and mentoring. Expecting managers to transform themselves has proven fruitless (and debilitating.)

Conclusions & Recommendations

• Culture is an outcome of persistent efforts to improve, innovate, and learn. These three efforts are inter-related and must be on-going. (A 2-day Design Thinking Workshop or a 5-day Value Stream Mapping Workshop aren’t effective for persistent change.) Create opportunities to improve conditions allowing teams and programs to deliver on their commitments: Effective Delivery has proven to be an accelerator of positive (and innovative) culture emergence and persistence.
• Resistance to Change is often cited as a naturally occurring condition. I don’t believe this is true. (This hasn’t been my workplace experience, too.) Most people want to learn through their experiences (both personal and professional.) They may not have an explicit goal of learning, but they’re usually happier when it’s one outcome. What’s classified as resistance (especially in the workplace) is the result of a lack of inclusion and a lack of planning. It’s assumed that “If we do X we will get Y.” Stop attempting to replicate what worked for the competition or what you saw in a workshop (directly) and engage your teams (management, and leadership) in open discussion and planning for all forms of change. While it may appear unwieldy and lengthy, this will end up being the shortest (and sometimes awakening) path to successful outcomes.
• Agile Skills & Agile Training, while inextricably linked, are also very well understood. Leadership and management do their employees (and themselves, indirectly) a disservice skimping on formal, inclusive training for all practitioners with ample opportunity for real-world scenarios included. (I still see “Train the Trainer” resulting in ineffective training of the majority of team and program members.) There’s ample value in pre-packaged training material (and workshops), but the norm is for employees to return to their (real and virtual) desks the next day and be stymied in how to apply what they’ve heard, seen, and potentially learned. Your most effective Agile practitioners can lead the effort to improve the skills (and productivity) at the team and program levels. Learning directly from one’s peers (where the context is almost guaranteed to be real-world scenarios) is the shortest path to high quality (and predictive) Agile outcomes. This is the bedrock upon which successful Enterprise Agility is built.
• Management Support is the least emphasized (and most poorly understood, at least in my experience) practice when working with the adoption and emergence of Agile practices and the goal of Business Agility. The myriad of management roles and practices makes this an especially challenging condition (especially for those IN these roles.) Self-organizing teams often appear to spell doom for traditional management roles (and while “Doom” isn’t the intention, adopting and supporting self-organizing teams does challenge the need for traditional management roles and practices.) The most direct (open, and honest) way to resolve this angst is to announce, accept (and endorse) that your organization’s model (AKA, Org Chart) will be in flux for the next year and that no one is losing their job. (Depending on the size, scale, and complexity of your business practice, one year may to little time or too much time. When in doubt, double the amount of time you decided to use.)