Agile - Embrace It
Alan Taylor
Unlocking potential for seamless delivery. Supporting leaders and their teams. Consultant | Coach | Facilitator | Trainer | Speaking | Podcast host
- Risk Reduction
- Early Return on Investment
- Employee Satisfaction
IT Projects' High Failure Rates
A McKinsey article article (1 Michael Bloch, Sven Blumberg, and Jürgen Laartz 2013 ) showedthat of large IT Software projects (budgets >$10million):- 66% had cost overrun (Average of 45% over)
- 33% had schedule overrun (Average of 7% late)
- 17% benefits shortfall (Average 56% less value than predicted)
- 17% failed so badly that they threatened the companies’ continued existence
Agile Improves Results
The statistics above are for projects using no specific management paradigm. When the various project management methodologies are compared, it becomes clear that Traditional (Waterfall) fails the worst, and you will notice a quite scary point, that it fares no better than 'Ad-Hoc' (where the team does not follow a defined process) (2 Scott Ambler and Associates, published in DrDobbsJournal Feb 2014
So Agile can improve success rates, that's good, but its not the only advantage Agile provides? Due to the way projects are run, it provides advantages at all levels of the organisation, but again I emphasisif everyone is fully on-board.
Risk Reduction
Many projects have significant issues, such as significantly changing requirements and underestimated tasks. Now Agile mitigates these risks in various ways:
- Requirements Change; with Stakeholder involvement in the continual prioritisation of features (Stories), changes become welcome and are usually done before the work is begun
- Under-estimated work; on average 45% of functionality provided in a project is never used (3 (Jeff De Luca 2013)), and in Agile projects the most important things are done first. Now imagine a project where there is a problem which blows out the total cost of work, so the last 20% can't be completed in time. An Agile run project will deliver all of the essential functionality on time, with some of the low-value items. If the same happened in a Waterfall project, it is likely that that business would have to wait and bear the cost of not having the new system, added to the extra cost to complete it all
- Technical issues; because the solution is not designed up front in detail, when issues are identified, the team can adapt and work out the best solution. From there the project continues without the overhead of re-designing everything that comes after it
There are many more scenarios where Agile helps in Risk Reduction and simplifies management tasks.
Early Return on Investment
As mentioned in the 'Risk Reduction' topic above, the highest value stories are developed first. They are also developed in Iteration Reviews (aka Showcases) and demonstrated and released for users/clients to test or use regularly. This gives early feedback so issues can be resolved and improvements can be made quickly.
The code can then be released for general use earlier, with the key functionality that has greatest value in place. That means you don't have to wait a year to see the benefits, you may be able to benefit in half the time. This can be a massive saving; cost reduction in taking out an old system early, reaping the benefits earlier and/or a benefit in beating the competition to market.
Conclusion
There are many more benefits to Agile (and Lean, etc.). The points above simply summarise that it is a direction to be explored and with those points in mind, it is demonstrated that Agile will:
- Improve project success rates
- Reduce the number of "challenged" and failed projects
- Reduce Risk and make management of it easier
- Regular feedback to ensure the team are building the right thing
- ROI can be achieved earlier
- Improve employee satisfaction and consequently improve team effectiveness
A quote from Microsoft's story about their transition to Agile confirms these benefits very succinctly (4 Microsoft – Scaling Agile Across the Enterprise)
All these changes have helped us deliver a better product, but they've also directly contributed to a boost in morale. Employee satisfaction is a success measure. In the old world, a team might have to wait a year or more before a customer exercised the code they had written. With a more frequent delivery cadence, it's now just weeks between checking something in and having it actually show up in production. That's rewarding. Once we switched to this rapid cadence, teams never wanted to go back.
Some good points there Alan.
I leverage decades of experienced honed craft & relentless doggedness, to helm complex programs & projects to success.
10 年classic stats Alan - thanks. Agile, 5 letters, just like the word logic!