A new approach to improving Agility
Principle-driven evolution over practice-driven dogma
This is the last in a three-part series about agile adoption initiatives. In part one, I pointed out the obvious recent trend — the decline in the number of agile transformations and very low demand for agile roles. I listed what I thought of as the main reasons behind this trend. In particular, why there is so much ‘resistance to change’ — a phrase I totally dislike, because in a sense it is victim-blaming — and the lack of a clear compelling reason to change.
In part two, I wrote about the impact of frameworks — agile methods with mandated roles and events and artefacts that are imposed on entire organisations with little consideration of local context, environment, or even need, and why we don’t like being told how to do our jobs.
In this, the last article in the series (for now at least), I propose what I believe is a new approach to agile adoption or improvement initiatives that takes into account the results of the State of Agile reports for the last decade, my own personal experiences over a similar timeframe, and what other people are saying about the alleged death of agile.
Reports suggest that, among software development teams, by 2021 between 85% and 95% of organisations were using at least some agile practices and more than half of product, R&D and engineering teams were also utilising agile frameworks. So, agile is mainstream.
But have they all been successful? If agile is now mainstream, what benefits has it brought?
The State of Agile report for 2024 suggests it is less than expected, showing that only 44% of organisations say that agile is working well (only 11% say “very well”) and while 60% are “satisfied” with Agile, only 18% are “very satisfied”.
There is a dichotomy here — agile is mainstream, but more than most are not particularly happy with it. My own analysis of the “agile is dead” stories reveals that the main complaints are the overemphasis on adherence to rigid frameworks, superficial transformations (agile in name only), misaligned expectations, erosion of agile values and scaling challenges.
This series of articles is an attempt to try to dissect these complaints, understand why and what are the root causes. The previous two articles in this series have described what I have come to think of as the core problems with agile adoption initiatives:
- The lack of a business Purpose, mission or justification for the change,
- Dogmatic adherence to Practice-driven frameworks, and
- The lack of a Roadmap for sustainable change.
Without a purpose, a mission or a business justification for the change, management and senior leadership probably won’t support it, and anyone directly impacted by the change who doesn’t understand why will inevitably resist the change.
When asked to adopt a set of rules that prescribe new practices, roles and artefacts that clash with their ways of working that have evolved over perhaps years, people are likely to resist those too, but often pay lip service to it because it is easier.
Without an appropriate approach to driving positive change — a roadmap if you will — the default way of delivering change is limited to education, training and ‘coaching’ people how to comply with the chosen framework. None of which, we know, is particularly effective.
If the statistics and survey results are to be believed, there are many, many organisations with sub-optimal agile implementations, in which new ways of working have been adopted, but without the return on the considerable investment that was put in.
I believe there is a different path to becoming more agile, of understanding why we want to get there, and how, in a pragmatic way that doesn’t just disrupt the status quo. I have come to believe that transformation can easily become more disruptive than productive; that we want to evolve, to improve, without sacrificing things that work already.
I am in the process of expanding and documenting these ideas into a robust approach, but essentially it has the following components:
- A means of defining a Purpose for the initiative
- A set of lean/agile Principles, chosen to meet the objective defined by the purpose, that provide teams with the autonomy to choose appropriate roles, events and practices to meet the stated principles and achieve the objectives, to master their own agility
- A roadmap, a series of steps to drive the improvement initiative, based on sound change management principles and practices.
This is not the finished product; the approach is in its infancy, but this series of articles is a starting point for discussion and evolution.
If you would like to know more about this approach, please get in touch. I need collaborators to help with the business or ‘product’ side of it, and potential customers who are prepared to use the approach in their organisation to improve their development and delivery performance, without spending a fortune.
