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6 Signs That Your Organization Is Not Ready for Agile
May 10, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management
6 Signs That Your Organization Is Not Ready for Agile
By Bruno Collet
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make an educated guess about the Agile potential of an organization without doing a full scale assessment? Let’s look at signs that any observer can notice when spending a few hours in the workplace.
- Detailed procedures about everything: They assume that there is a reusable recipe for any situation. They ignore that many situations are unique because needs and context change everyday. Procedures and processes are not bad in themselves, detailed directive procedures are.
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Client out of sight: In some workplaces the client is a kind of abstraction, an entity we contact by email and the occasional meeting. Collaboration is reduced to a few key events such as capturing requirements, reporting at milestones, and validating tests results, without much else in between.
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Coworkers out of sight: Individual cubicles with high walls, narrow corridors, and the like. Workplace arrangement significantly influences how people behave and collaborate. If it fosters individual, analytic work, don’t expect much collaboration beyond the few formal meetings and emails.
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Meeting mania: A by-product of the other points, meetings are scheduled for any reason. Most of these reasons would be better served by a brief face-to-face discussion. Unnecessary meetings introduce delays (rooms and people are overbooked) and tend to waste the time of many participants.
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Detailed timesheets: They epitomize the belief that work can be forecast in detail. People consciously or unconsciously alter their behavior in order for their daily work to fit in timesheets. Note that timesheets are not bad in themselves, detailed timesheets are.
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Restricted access to internet and to personal email: Security hazard vs. work/collaboration tool. For me the choice is obvious, but apparently not for everyone.
I don’t pretend this short list replaces a professional assessment, but it might provide a few hints.
How can we adopt Agile if the organization seems at odds with Agile prerequisites?
Note that it is highly uncommon for an organization to be just ripe for Agile. I have yet to see a workplace where Agile practices can be implemented quickly and on a full scale. In most cases, follow these simple guidelines:
- Choose scale: Identify pilot projects, teams, or organizational units
- Choose practices: Determine which Agile practices make sense and implement agile progressively
- Assess added value: Always keep in mind that Agile is not an end in itself. Assess objectively if and where it can add value.
Bruno Collet combines business acumen with technology know-how. His successful track record comprises Daimler-Chrysler, Siemens, and Loto-Quebec, with roles such as management consultant, project manager, SAP consultant, and software architect. Bruno Collet’s skills are firmly grounded in academic excellence by achieving an MBA at John Molson School of Business and a Master of Computer Science. He maintains a professional website: brunocollet.com.
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4 people have left comments
I would guess that an organization in which all 6 signs are observed, would not really care about its agile potential or even spent a sec thinking whether or not to implement new practices at all. What would you think?
Vicky,
You would be surprised. Many executives read about Agile in industry magazines or hear about it in a business event. Because Agile sounds so “common sense”, most people believe that it can be implemented easily and have no clue about the organizational/cultural enablers.
It’s our professional responsibility to point at both advantages and disadvantages and to assess whether it makes sense in the first place.
In particular, Agile is now in the spotlight for large companies such as banks, that have longstanding waterfall culture, silo functions, and a billion compliance regulations. It would be absurd to come to these orgs with, for example, a Scrum 101 approach.
Bruno
While I’m no expert on Agile, I’d like to add the following:
The organization’s culture does not tolerate failure.
I frequently see advice about implementing “agile” progressively. I am uncertain how feasible this is in practice.
I mean in order for some agile practices to actually work as expected some other (higher level managerial type) practices must also be agile. What I usually see is a half-baked attempt at agile (where say the developers/analysts try to follow the agile methodology and the managers/architects/team leader have to report and follow some variation of RUP or other model), which also usually does not work out.
I am all in favor of incrementally introducing agile practices but the increment has to be a vertical slice in the organization from top to bottom layers in order to see any results. I don’t know if someone else has had a different experience.