Why Agile is Doomed to Fail
Gordon Tredgold Globally Ranked Leadership Expert
Global Gurus Top Leadership Expert, Coach and Speaker - "RESULTS BASED LEADERSHIP"
Having worked with multiple companies who have made the move to Agile, there is one issue that I see that keeps them from achieving the full benefits of Agile.
Agile is a great methodology and can have a transformative impact on results, but if you see it as just a methodology you forever struggle.
To achieve the maximum potential from Agile, you need to have Agile leadership, and Agile organization, and Agile cross-departmental processes otherwise Agile will just die on the vine.
Just implementing the methodology is like deciding to go to the gym to lose weight.
It's a great idea, but if you don't change your eating habits as well, then not much is going to change. Nutrition contributes 80% to your weight, where exercise just 20%.
It's the same with Agile. Methodologies only have about 20% impact on your operational performance. The other 80% comes from the organizational setup, levels of bureaucracy, leadership, employee engagement, and attitude.
I remember one company I worked for who claimed to have gone all-in with Agile. But the majority of their projects were cross departments and these departments still operated as silos, often with different goals and objectives. They might have been Agile within a silo but cross-silo they still remained deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking and doing things.
This didn't just stop the benefits of Agile being achieved, it actually made things worse. It's like trying to get individuals to run faster, but then tieing their legs together, which then ends in chaos and increased failure.
Agile methodologies can only thrive in an Agile environment.
You cannot have purchasing processes that require layers and layers approvals, you cannot retain the 40-page business cases, you can't have leaders who want to approve every minor detail, and you can't have 8-week lead times for key components and still expect to deliver sprints every two weeks.
Agile needs to be in the DNA of the entire company, or it will be throttled by the bureaucracy of other departments or other teams who haven't embraced.
I'd love to hear if you have similar or different experiences, please share in the comments below.
Network Architecture and Engineering
5 年Hahah
Scrum Master
5 年Hmmmm......how many articles are out there articulating this message.....how many organisations are taking heed.....?
Retired at Retired
5 年Great summary of why it is destined to fail in many companies. If the whole company is not part of the process it will fail.
Principal Software Engineer Lead at OpenText
5 年Software is like quantum physics - It doesn't exist until you observe it.? Iterate on my friends.
integrated circuit design at erckert engineering
5 年Here is an example where agile won't work: You have a chip that randomly fails in the field (PPM range). Since it is random it takes you thousands of tries slightly modifying the operating conditions. Even worse besides operating conditions it also depends on random production spread. Simulation doesn't show the effect even after hundreds of CPU hours on 1000 CPUs running MC simulations.... Finding out what really causes the failure takes months of pure experiments (pure test run time!). A mask set costs a million. Personal experience: What can be solved quickly is already solved anyway! This pattern applies to almost every mask set with code 'C' (3rd full mask redesign) or higher Sure you can act agile creating a mask set based on random guess every week. I'm absolutely sure finance will stop this agility - and they are right! In this case agile burns resources you better use for investigating. Conclusion: Agile is nice as long as the experiment is cheap. If the experiment costs a significant amount of money or can even cause fatal accidents agile will stop!