Are You a Victim of Broken Agile?

It's not that uncommon anymore.

Tell me if this is you:

Your company either hired someone who had used Agile methods in a previous position or has someone in place who was sold on the idea we could get 'twice the work done in half the time' we were doing it previously. The 'Kool Aide' flowed freely.

But it didn't exactly happen that way.

It's ok, you're not alone. This is a scenario I have come to describe as "Agile Recovery". We used to talk about things like Project Recovery and more recently, Product Recovery.

These can be defined as someone having an initial great idea about a project or product, generate excitement , gather the funding, plan it out and start the journey towards value seen. But, somewhere along the way we ran into problems, blockers, and challenges. The product isn't delivered, its over budget, beyond timelines and a bigger effort than we thought it would be.

So we engage in project or product recovery. Rethink its value and strategy. We ask some experts and get an outside view to find out how we can finally begin to see value from this great idea; and the idea is still great by the way.

The exact same thing happened with Agile Transformation efforts.

It was always a great idea. But once we got into it, we found problems, blockers, challenges. Some challenges happen to every company and some are unique to us. The agility (or twice the work in half the time) we thought we were going to enjoy simply hasn't manifest itself in quite the way we thought. We've run out of transformation budget and the effort has become much larger than we thought it would be.

We need Agile Recovery.

Agile, or it's underlying frameworks, were never the problem. How its launched, what expectations were set, with who, and what change management was employed has played a huge role in how quickly value is seen from any attempted transformation.

There are telltale signs of this scenario by the way. I'm going to go all "Jeff Foxworthy" here for a second...

If you're Agile transformation is viewed as purely an IT initiative, you need Agile Recovery.

If you're Agile roles are starting to be seen as expendable or lacking value, you need Agile Recovery.

If you're leadership is vocally placing pressure on the Agile teams to start showing the value they were promised, you need Agile Recovery.

If there are already whispers around the office that Agile just wont work in our company, you need Agile Recovery.

If your leadership is saying the effort to make these changes is growing too large, you need Agile Recovery.

If everyone in the company is attempting to use the same exact methods, metrics and roles to solve different problems, you need Agile Recovery.

The list can go on but you get my point.

There are many declining Agile transformation efforts going on that need real recovery if they are ever going to realize the value from the money and time invested. It's going to take more than a self-evaluation. It takes getting another set of eyes to see where the holes are and provide brutal transparency for the people who have the position to execute real changes.

I'm not talking about a Sr Process Engineer who has been delegated with organizing global transformation efforts. That's probably how you got here.

Do you really want twice the work in half the time? This kind of radical change can only come from senior leadership, period. And its collective organizational leadership, not just the CIO. If we have learned anything in the past 24 years it's that Agile is NOT an IT-only concept. Leadership wants company-wide agility, not spotty departmental agility.

Change is hard, expensive and takes time. Launching a product to market is easy-peasy compared to having to change the culture of a company and the way we look at value and delivery.

Like anyone in recovery...get help. It cannot be done alone.

See the value of your investments and finally become a more effective and resilient organization.