Agile Transformation Challenges

Any change bring unprecedented challenges, which appear, on their own without any announcements the same applies to agile transformation. Some of us are resistors, adopters, followers and promoters and their respective behavior appear as challenges in Agile implementation.

Resistors are people or group who can make big impact on go forward vision but standing against the vision.

Adopters are people or group who are willing to contribute but they need data points to support their move to help them answer why they aligned themselves towards vision.

Followers are people or group who are willing to contribute but they need prescription from their leaders to move ahead.

Promoters are willing to contribute and they are leading the new vision. For any change, promoters should be picked first to drive the transformation.

Those who are undergoing Agile Implementation they may face following challenges.

• Team member mindset in Agile delivery model. They defaulted their behavior to look at prescriptive model like traditional methods. They look at most senior team member for prescriptions and unwilling to stand on their opinion.
• Within the organization Project Management community hard to accept Agile way of working due to uncertainty about performance measures.
• Command and control lenses are biggest problem in Agile implementation. Decades of following prescription from top make individual mind to think whatever coming from top is right.
• Thinking of leaders that they are the smartest in hierarchy and what they decide is right.
• Team members overly reliance on senior people of project to make decisions for them.
• In many cases, personal independence leads to developing easier requirements early and complex functionality being left to later stage.
• Various stakeholder outside project take their own time to make decisions.
• Missing enterprise architect to look at holistically to minimize Big system technical debt.
• Resilience and acceptance towards fail fast approach. On face value, everyone agrees but when failure occur then people are dissociating from them.

 There are many more similar challenges appearing in different projects. However, if we look at holistically it all pointing towards Organization culture. Culture is basically a collection of all the shared values, beliefs, practices, and norms that help individual within a group to navigate through situations and solve problem. Agile Transformation is not another set of new process it is major culture change. It basically changing the whole DNA of the organization how it works.