Why Agile isn't working for you?

Few selling points agile has is - building trust/collaboration, early delivery of product with better quality and above all customer satisfaction!

Have had glory of been involved in multiple agile projects as team member, scrum master and now as Agile Coach, Few were able to hit bulls eye and fulfil the commitment but at few places, it was just a fad. Though there are multiple reasons on why agile doesn't give promised results but let's see few that are on my top priority list -

• Red Dashboards - In one of my coaching assignments, teams performance was based on number of defects logged in system. Hence quality criteria had a shift "Detection of Defects over Prevention of Defects". This lead to unmanageable backlogs and, eventually, ineffective development.Though as coach there were couple of instances where I tried to influence change in these metrics but leadership was not ready to budge!

Solution - Organisational performance metrics and leadership alignment is key to agile success

• Communication - When an agile transformation journey is triggered, I have seen team caught up in initial excitement of collaboration and building trust but eventually pressure to deliver continuously, maintain constant pace takes the toll and eventually burns down the team.

Solution - Set right expectations with team and other stakeholders, Agile journey sees a J-Curve effect. Teams will storm before they perform. It is important to understand availability and frequency of interactions with the customer. The more the customer can be involved in the day-to-day project activities, the better the communication, and eventually less documentation.

• Development - With agile comes a myth, except change in requirement at any stage of development and also with agile no planning is needed. Once I was questioned, agile principle says "Responding to Change Over Following a Plan" but when it comes to agile ceremonies, agile planning is the biggest(time frame) ceremony - Don't you contradict yourself? and as a result most organisations find it really tough to spend even 4hrs in sprint planning.

Solution - Planning is really important, agile says plan for only few days and not big upfront planning. Define, Refine and change requirements every 2-3 weeks.We look just far enough into the future to identify and do what we need to do to deliver now and to enable value in the future. Factor in unknowns and be proactive towards change during each sprint. Agile promotes balanced amount of learning, analysis and development.

• Continuous Integration - Continuous Integration leads to Continuous Delivery. But teams avoid integrating code to master branch frequently. Reason - Builds Fail! And they find it really difficult to fix error. This mindset shift to fix this red flag early even before it is merged in main branch and eventually we might find this late in system takes lot of effort and is slow process. "No matter what continuous integration server says, we still deliver new features to our end-users. We’ll fix our build later"

Solution - Create rule that not all can merge changes to "master".Set permissions!Automate merging and before merging to master is done, automated sanity tests are executed, and if it breaks, branch is rejected.Your changes aren't merged, Now it’s your responsibility — to fix them and call the script again.

Please remember, no methodology takes away responsibility from individual team members.Responsibility, Self Organisation and accountability is key to success for any methodology(agile, waterfall etc.). It's important to be agile in thinking, before you deliver agility.