I don’t want to sound like a scratched CD, but Agile Adoption can be very difficult. We often underestimate the ability of ourselves or others to understand and adjust to change – and it is a cultural change required in order to really be successful in adopting the agile mindset.
Shane Hastie has a great post about this on InfoQ, with a collection of quotes from leaders in the the subjects. For example, Ken Schwaber (co-developer of Scrum) estimates that a majority of organisations that use Scrum fail to succeed in realising its benefits:
Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organisation’s product and system development practices. The intention of Scrum is to make them transparent so the organisation can fix them. Unfortunately, many organisations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them …
Several changes, or cultural shifts, are required to use Scrum. The first is to forget predictive, waterfall thinking. The second is to realise that self-management is a much better practice for productivity and creativity. The third is to understand that cross-functional teams produce more robust products. All of these changes are extremely difficult.
David Anderson offers the following advice to avoid the trap above:
First, at the highest level, management needs to understand that Agile is not a “silver bullet.” It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility.
To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organisational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap. Developing capabilities and organisational maturity requires investment in appropriately tailored processes and tools that support them. Adopting Agile principles should be part of this ongoing effort to mature the development organisation.
Second, the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility. To change a culture it’s important to recognise that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organisation is the reflection of those decisions and actions.
Next, it’s important that all the people understand and internalise the concepts and ideals behind the Agile movement. Giving them a copy of the Agile Manifesto isn’t enough. It needs to be communicated as principles and translated into concepts that can be widely applied to the many day-to-day decisions each of them will make. To build an Agile culture, the entire workforce must internalise and live three principles: making progress with imperfect information; existing in a high trust, high social capital culture; and shortening cycle times. These ideas need to be infused into the workforce at every opportunity.
Infusing these principles into the culture means it should spread virally. It can start with just one manager, who educates his immediate direct reports on the concepts and then takes the time to reflect and show how each decision is aligned the principles. I have taken the step of adding “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”, to my email signature and encouraging my team to ask, “Have we reached the ‘good enough’ point yet? Or are we trying to be too perfect?” When the team begins to talk the language of underlying Agile principles then they begin to make decisions aligned with Agile values and the result is the viral spread of an Agile culture.
Any change to culture is hard, as culture is nothing more than the sum of repeated behaviour, and changing the behaviour of any group of people is hard. However, it is worth it. Make sure you focus on the outcome, on what we are trying to achieve, and the difficulties encountered along the way become little more than opportunities to learn and change.
