Some Big Companies Still Fail With Agile

Knowledge is futile unless it is applied. Knowing things but not reaping the applied benefits can lead to frustration and waste. Many leaders and senior staff in some of the world’s biggest companies are still developing digital solutions in ways that don’t exactly reflect efficiency, pragmatism, and optimal customer satisfaction.

Agile software development has permeated the vast world of software development for over 20 years now and shows little sign of slowing down. Not exclusive to IT, agile project management and product development has revolutionized the way in which digital solutions are implemented and maintained.

Despite the global popularity, a vast number of recognized professional accreditations, mass adoption from large and successful technology titans such as Amazon, Google, Apple and the like, many big companies not only struggle with agile practices, but actively operate using older methodologies such as waterfall. This article looks at the ramifications of such practices.?

Why Waterfall is Not Optimal

Development within waterfall cascades down, phases only start once the previous phase is completed. Tacitly this erects silos and barriers; walls that can become insurmountable in the long-run and prevent genuine transparency amongst the team.

Without transparency, proper inspection is limited if not non-existent, and without consistent inspection, adaptability is lost or heavily reduced. Transparency, inspection and adaptability are core pillars within the agile framework, these proven traits usually lead to better products in the long run.

Product Management authority Marty Cagan writes:

“While we’re busy doing this process and wasting our time and money, the biggest loss of all usually turns out to be the opportunity cost of what the organization could have and should have been doing instead. We can’t get that time or money back. It’s no surprise that so many companies spend so much time and money and get so little in return.”?

The simple fact is resources are being depleted and end-users and are wondering where the time and money has gone. If you’ve been part of any project within a large organization, you’ll know this is unfortunately normal in so many cases.?

Resources have been wasted and a huge reason is because of the way in which the project has been managed; waterfall projects in today’s world feels outdated and much less responsive to the needs of the customer. This observation isn’t new, nor ground-breaking, but it’s amazing how many companies still operate in such an antiquated way, the question is why?

Culture Clash

An often-overlooked consideration for poor or no agile adoption stems from the fact that large corporations are simply not culturally known for being the most nimble, malleable, and pragmatic, especially when it comes to software solutions and digital transformations. Large corporations tend to operate top-down, steering the ship all the way from the top and orders cascading downwards; everything going down, and very little going back up.

To a large extent, every large company operates to some degree like this. Even the more receptive tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and so on all still maintain some degree of traditional corporate structure. The key difference however is the fact that on the developmental/product innovation level, the level responsible for product design, software implementation and product management, agile practices are woven into all facets of their internal operations. The results: constant innovation, market dominance and the ability to respond to customers in remarkable time.?

Companies who truly adopt agile principles will drive recruitment that reflects this, teams will expect, maintain, and promote these traits and at most levels, agile principles are the norm. Furthermore, most of the innovation and “disruption” has come from companies who can respond to customer needs in a timely manner; only agile approaches can meet the customer needs in such a way. Think of what Monzo has done to banking, Lemonade to insurance, Airbnb to hotels and hospitality and Twitter to public communication.

Do you really think these companies would have been able to disrupt the behemoth industries they have if they were not pragmatic, nimble and (of course) agile? No!

Psychological Barriers

Culturally, many (not all) large corporations have psychological difficulties in adapting to agile practices. Many senior staff ponder the notion along the lines of?

“I’ve been doing this this way for most of my career, and it’s got me here, why should I change?”?

Blockbuster and Kodak thought in the same way and those household names are now irrelevant and obsolete.

The ability to respond to change and produce products that customers love is critical to survival in today’s product saturated world. Customers implicitly bring expectations and mannerisms from other apps when using similar apps. This is done subconsciously, but it is a very real part of a user’s journey. When you look at Instagram’s latest interface for example, you can clearly see the fact that it is modelled on TikTok due to TikTok’s dominance in social media.

This is relevant because it demonstrates two significant points: firstly, Instagram understands what is described in the?Laws of UX?as?Jakob’s Law, the idea that users expect your site, app, platform etc., to work and operate in the same way as others, in this case, the market leader, TikTok. A quote from Jon Yablonski's Law of UX reads:

“This observation, which Nielsen describes as a law of human nature, encourages designers to follow common design conventions, enabling users to focus more on the site’s content, message or product.”

Without the Instagram staff being close to customers and understanding their needs, changes like this would be timely and costly to scope, implement and deploy. In truth, we don’t know the specifics of their UX/UI update, but it does reflect agile in the sense that customer collaboration, inspection and adaptability and changing requirements is reflected in the product constantly.

Product Management > Project Management

The responsiveness to change and customer satisfaction is perhaps the clearest distinction for the need for ample product management as opposed to traditional project management. Projects follow timelines, milestones and tend to resist change, even if customers desire change.?

According to an article from Nash Tech?agile adoption is slow for two main reasons: large companies desire for predictability and long-standing traditions.

“Whether it's about cost or outcomes, predictability is important to large organisations as small mishaps may lead to large regulatory or financial impacts. Big firms want to know upfront what they're getting, which often means extensive requirements documentation.”

According to a report from Capgemini:?

“Scaling agile leads to significant value upside, yet only a handful of organizations are successful at it.”

Product management actively incorporates change in a fluid, responsive and elastic way due to the core principles and practices of agile being embedded into the tools, artefacts and mannerisms of what product management is. Maybe this approach is deemed too risky for so many decision makers. Are agile principles only adopted by the?risk adverse?

RAG is the Measure of Progress Not Working Software?

Senior stakeholders at many companies tend to operate from a top-down, high-level perspective, expecting where and when key milestones will be delivered and accomplished. There are cost pressures, investors, and other senior stakeholders who have a significant stake in the outcome of the project. Therefore, it makes sense to have a good idea of where and when key milestones will be delivered. Right?

One problem… We know the least at the beginning and this is when we are expected to have a good idea of how things will unfold!

A major problem with planning, especially at the start of the initiative is the lack of understanding and clarity of the road ahead. This is because at the start you naturally know the least, therefore, the plan is not going to be the accurate due to the lack of information.

Now, pragmatism and the ability to be malleable or?agile?is welcome here, right??

Well, so many companies still believe in sticking to plans with ferocious rigidity. Plans become sacrosanct; they become project ‘idols’ that are the be-all-and-end-all of project progress. Project ‘success’ is marked by the ability to stick to the plan as best as possible, any deviation is seen as a failure.

So, additional meetings to ascertain why the RAG is amber or red now fills diaries, creating more time?away?from the desk and time is spent (or wasted) on calls/meetings to explain why the plan has been altered and when development will return to the original (outdated) plan trajectory. It isn't uncommon to not have any working software, vis-à-vis, software the end-user can actually use to solve a problem 6 months or 12 months after project kick-off!

Plans are still relevant in Agile

It is a good time to remind you that agile practices do not eliminate planning. Agile practices still view plans as important as they can help teams stay focused. However, a plan that was derived 6 months prior, when information was scarce, the team knew least about each other and best practices, knew least about their internal workflows, processes, development time, the customer’s needs, their velocity and so on, should naturally change.

But many companies still don’t operate like this. In some cases, companies double-down and insist on even more plans.

Conclusion?

In truth, an entire book could be written on this issue, but for now, it’s important to remember that some big companies are still wasteful when it comes to product development due to the fact they struggle to transition and truly adopt and embrace agile practices.?

In the long run they will continue to lose money and time and struggle to hire the very best talent that is available as the best people tend to want to be part of innovative and rewarding work, not wasteful and stress-inducing work.

A combination of psychological, historical, traditional, and economic factors plays a part. Bottom line is, many of these companies are shooting themselves in the foot due to the opportunity cost of what they produce vs what could be, and this won’t last forever; eventually the penny will drop, but at what cost?