Why Agile Projects Fail

Take an Agile course, know the Agile Manifesto by heart, memorise the 12 principles and become a Certified Scrum Master. Get back to the team and start following agile practices. Tell them how waterfall model sucks. Let it be known how great agile is and here on should be "the process" for all projects to be successful.

You may have spent many years preaching agile since becoming a Certified Scrum Master. Going through the scrum routine - product backlog, backlog grooming, sprint planning, daily stand-up, retrospective, burn-down chart, team velocity and so on. Looking back at all those projects many of them may have failed. It could be that many of them were delivered and went on to be released in production. They're used by customers. Some of those projects were failure. How is it possible though?

Agile is supposed to make all projects succeed. However, even after almost two decades since Agile Manifesto was published, projects using agile methodologies are still failing. Is it still a knowledge problem? or Is it a people problem? If you ask many agile teams what is the reason agile isn't working, answer includes Stakeholder Engagement consistently on top. I've seen Change Management as another issue.

Let us assume an organisation or a team want to run project using agile. What are the typical chain of events? Project Managers get trained to become scrum masters, team members do the same or are given agile training. They choose a framework either Scrum or Kanban or other. Fast forward six months, things aren't going as well as it was supposed to. The Stakeholders are busy, teams miss daily stand-up, retrospective doesn't get done. It's common in agile world. What are we doing wrong?

Lets go back to agile manifesto. The first line - "Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools". Lets rephrase that. Individuals and Interactions essentially refers to People. So its People Over Process and Tools. Process and Tools refer to Scrum, Kanban, JIRA and so on. If you were to choose Scrum as your framework or tool, the manifesto would be People over Scrum. So its "People". What do most agile practitioners focus on though? Scrum or Kanban or Story Points. We've all been following the manifesto upside down. Rather than putting our focus on People, we rush to implement the process and tools. So what do we do?

Projects were failing because of process and tools. They still fail because of them. And we are all going in circles replacing one process with another in a hope of achieving a different result. What we forget is people make projects a success, not process and tools. My next phase of agile journey is to focus on people.

When you start your agile journey, first thing you would have to do is to let go of all your preconceived agile assumptions because your team members know what you're going to do next. This only creates resistance - either passive or active. This makes change management extremely difficult. So the best way to start agile is to let your team know agile is not the end goal. You may not even end up implementing agile.

Most important part is to collaborate, form relationships and trust within the team. Then let the team decide when they're ready to embark on the agile journey. Sure it takes time but it sets a strong foundation for your team. Let each member have a say and shape your own process based on your team values and culture.