Why 76% Of Organizations Are Failing At Agile

David Hawks from AgileVelocity.com gave a great presentation to 50 Agilists at Agile Austin this week.

He used an interactive poll from PollEveryWhere.com which was a nice touch, so the audience could vote in real time on a question and we could see the results in a bar chart.

Four phases of change:

1. "Status Quo"

2. "Chaos and Resistance" When we introduce change the process always get worse.

3. "Integration and Practice" is next in which things slowly get better.

4. "New Status Quo" where things are genuinely better.

Four Agile Steps:

Align
Why are we going to Agile? It's not just to "do" Agile. Goal should be something like improve time to market, improve productivity, make happier customers, and have better quality.
Learn
Everyone needs to understand Agile.
Predict
We need to make things predictable before going faster.
Accelerate
This is where we actually start getting better.
Adapt
Try new things like Experiment Based Development

David had us do a small task in groups.

Why do so many companies struggle?

Most company think of Agile as a team level problem. Upper management just wants the team level to change, but not anything else. We need to change the System. We need to change the Organization, the leadership needs to understand Agility.

Three Impediments to Successful Agile Transformation

Implementing solutions without clarity in desired results

This produces:
Lots of resistance and frustration
Silo Optimization
No clear measure of success

We did another exercise on how the importance of different tasks to transform a culture.

Steps to Organizational Change

a. Create Urgency - "We have to get better,
    or our company may go bust."  (Comes for the top level)
b. Form a powerful coalition
c. Create a vision for change
d. Communicate the vision
e. Empower action
f. Create quick wins
g. Build on the change
h. Anchor wins in culture

No mechanism to resolve organizational level cross department impediments
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a. Impediments not resolved quickly
b. Resistance is empowered
c. Teams hit a ceiling and become disenfranchised
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Executives: We totally support agile, but what's the date, and what's the features?
Leaders Not Creating Focus
If the leaders say all projects are equally important - the teams have no priorities.

So, the people with the least knowledge of corporate urgency, select the tasks that are coolest, easiest, and whose sponsor screams the loudest.
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Impact:
a. lots of interruptions
b. No time to improve
c. no flow
d. no ability to forecast
e. slow time to value
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