Agile; Risk or Opportunity

In 1993, the first Scrum team was formed, and the mention for the "Agile" was put into action. It did not find a good way through the Middle East, by that time, due to the poor communications. Yet, after the Internet revolution in the Middle East, Agile methodologies became well known and people started adopting it as a "new trend". And that was the start of the mess.

Is it suitable for the Middle East?

Nobody actually asked that question! We just adopted the methodology without any reason. Projects and programs in the Middle East are concerned more into transformation, and are based on either legacy systems or even paper-based data. Thus, the critical success factor of such projects rely on the utilization of old data to enrich the new system and predict customer experience. This cannot be achieved using any of the Agile methodologies; not in the timeframe proposed by the customers or the timeframe that makes the project a success. I had first-hand experiences in mega projects in the Middle East, and none of them can be handled through any of the Agile methodologies.

The Agile was taken as a "buzz-word" to be used as a false impression of using the latest methodologies.

Is Agile only Scrum?

Since the early adoption of Agile in the Middle East, there was a conflict in understanding between Scrum and Agile. Thus, the vast majority of the companies I worked with or done consultancy for were referring to Scrum as Agile, limiting their understanding of Agile methodologies to only Scrum. Although Scrum might not be always suitable for the nature of the projects in Middle East, other methodologies might fit, such as Kanban, SAFe, or even XP in rare cases. This misconception is related to the next point in this article.

Did we learn Agile?

Short answer is "No". I worked with dozen companies and Scrum Masters and I rarely find someone who studied the Agile as a concept and its methodologies. Can you imagine a Scrum Master who cannot produce a burndown chart for the project? Can you imagine a Scrum Master in non-Scrum projects? Can you imagine a reasonable reason for a company to put a policy for the sprint duration across all existing and future projects?

The list of questions can go on and on without an answer except that some people tend to learn from white papers and articles, rather than having a well-structured course in the subject matter, nevertheless reading books.

In 2013 I had a consultancy task in a large software company in Saudi Arabia. This company was granted a major strategic project in the Kingdom and they awarded the project to a well-known Indian company as a sub-contractor. The project duration was 11 months and I was requested to intervein in the tenth month since no progress was done on the project, not even the requirements document. After studying the situation I found that the solution for this project is to work in Scrum. By that time, Scrum was not commonly known in Saudi Arabia. The first step I took towards the resolution of that situation is to send both teams to a formal crash training course of the Scrum methodology. From the exam results I could then spot the team that shall carry on the project and their roles. The project became a success and it is still working to that day Kingdom-wide.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, Agile methodologies are helpful for the conditions they were created for. We need to learn, understand, reason, and decide. This train of thoughts can turn the Risk of using Agile to an Opportunity to benefit from Agile.

#agile #agilemethodology #scrum #kanban #SAFe #xp #risk #opportunity #criticalsuccessfactor