Problems with Agile Rooted in the Organizational Operating Model

Staff resent or resist adopting Agile or don’t believe it adds value.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Staff were not part of the decision-making process to adopt Agile.

  • Staff are not empowered to decide what, when, where, and how to use Agile.

  • Staff resent being told how to do their jobs.

  • Transformation tried to do too much too fast.

  • Staff do not see the need.

  • Baseline metrics were not collected at the start to show before and after value.

  • Training was cursory and unpersuasive.

The solution to many of these is proper empowerment. To learn more, see:

Below are for common problems with Agile rooted in the organizational operating model, along with their root causes and links to further information.

If you would like to more on the solutions or would like to discuss your challenges, contact me to set up a free 30 minute consultation.

Agile has increased developer agility but decreased organizational agility.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Long-lived, fully-dedicated Agile teams increase developer productivity but restrict the organization’s ability to reconfigure its resources in response to rapidly changing challenges, opportunities, and strategies.

  • Scaled Agile frameworks, in particular, interfere with an organization’s ability to adapt. In fact, scaled Agile framework is a contradiction in terms, for

For more on this problem and what to do about it:

Despite the adoption of Agile, the Development Organization lacks custom-focus because Customers do not have authority to choose what to buy.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • The Development organization does not see its clients as customers with the right to choose what to buy (without requiring money changing hands).

  • Product Managers and Owners have adopted the mistaken belief that they own the products and have the right to decide what they customers will get instead of respecting their customers right to chose what they buy, as if a car dealership thinks it owns the cars their customers buy.

  • The intake process is not based on the business principle of market economics.

Despite the adoption of Agile, managers are expected to find ways to accommodate their clients expectations whether or not they have the resources.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Department budgets are based on last year’s spending, perhaps with an increase for high-level drivers, rather than actual anticipated needs of the business.

  • The onus for acquiring additional funding is typically the responsibility of the development organization, whereas an organizational operating model based on market economics puts the onus on the customer.

Agile has increased overhead instead of reducing it.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Staff are required to participate in the events of a scaled Agile framework regardless of whether they add value. For example, staff are required to participate in quarterly, big-room planning, yet priorities quickly change making those plans obsolete.

  • Staff are required to follow pre-existing waterfall procedures on top of new, prescribed Agile practices.

  • The organization expects requires staff to do agile practices whether or not they add value, thereby confusing the ends with the means.

Long-lived cross-functional teams have reduced staff’s ability to specialize.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • The policy that Agile teams must be long-lived, fully-dedicated and cross-functional requires team members to learn technologies and disciplines (including those beyond application engineering) that the organization already has. The costs of the short-term benefits are redundant skills sets and staff becoming generalists.

  • People cannot focus on their specialties because they can not count on getting help from other specialists.

Agile has reduced collaboration instead of increasing it.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Pressure on staff to use defined communication channels has discouraged taking the initiative to collaborate directly with others as needed.

  • The Agile program has forgotten Agile values Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

  • Long-lived teams block people from temporarily joining other teams even when it makes business sense.

  • Agile processes are implemented wholesale, not tailored to each situation.

IT does not allocate enough time to learning new and emerging technologies.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • IT does not have a reliable source of funding for innovation.

  • IT does not put forth requests for innovation funding.

  • Groups have not been empowered to operate as businesses-within-the-business. Consequently, they are not free to do everything a business needs to do long-term.

Despite the adoption of Agile customers find it difficult to get their requests prioritized.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • The development organization has been appointed Product Owners for assets such as applications) rather than the business which requested them (and ultimately paid for them).

  • The organization lacks a viable process by which business decision-makers set priorities within the bounds of available resources, or if necessary provide the funding for the necessary source.

The IT organization does not help its customers discover new, high-payoff digital business opportunities.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Departments in the IT organization do not see themselves as businesses-within-the business, but more as order takers.

  • Consequently, they do not meet with senior business executives to help them discover new digital opportunities.

A shift to project-centric to product-centric development has left little room for strategic initiatives, often with higher ROI.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Projects get bad name in Agile, but a project is defined as a temporary endeavor that creates a unique product, service, or result. Consequently, enhancement and repairs to existing products are still projects.

  • What they are really saying is that long-lived team supporting existing products are more efficient than short-lived teams working on something new, how long a team should live and what it should support is a business decision.

  • True organizational agility allocates the just the resources at just the right, and for as long it makes business sense.

Despite the adoption of Agile, customers are unhappy because their requests get deprioritized without their say, sometimes without being informed.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • The project intake process is unclear, poorly communicated, or badly designed.

  • The organization lacks a process for managing both requests for repairs and enhancements from mid-level business managers, in along with strategic initiatives from enterprise-level executives.

  • The IT organization lacks a process for managing priorities across the entire organization.

The Development organization still takes on more work than it can deliver, is frequently late delivering, and sometimes resorts to cutting corners.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • The request intake process is unclear, poorly communicated, and/or badly designed.

  • All work requests must be, by design, within the scope of IT’s resources or funded over and above the IT budget.

  • The organization lacks a request intake process during which IT sets priorities within the bounds of its resources.

Agile does not offer an effective way to manage priorities across the entire enterprise.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Product Managers and Product Owners for long-lived teams dedicated to products typically prioritize requests from mid-level business managers; and their priorities are set for each group, not the enterprise.

  • Scaled frameworks can coordinate priorities for multiple large solutions, but not for the entire enterprise, and when claims are made to the contrary, such as for SAFe’s Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) module, a close examination will reveal its systemic limitations.

Despite the adoption of Agile, departments are regularly over budget.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Budgets are based on last year’s spending, perhaps with an increase based on high-level drivers and cost-of-living adjustments) rather than the anticipated needs of the business.

Despite the adoption of Agile, estimates for new initiatives are frequently inaccurate.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Scaled frameworks produce accurate estimates if the work fits into a value stream in the network, but new initiatives often require a different configuration of teams.

  • In such cases, estimates are provided without the necessary input.

The IT organization does not help its customers discover new, high-payoff digital business opportunities.

ROOT CAUSES:

  1. Departments in the IT organization do not see themselves as entrepreneurs running businesses-within-the business whose on self-interest is to market their value to their customers.

  2. Because they see themselves effectively as order takers, they do not meet with business executives to help them discover new opportunities.

It is hard to get funding for the organization’s Agile program.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Business executives (the customers) were not provided a convincing business proposal during the budgeting process.

  • Budgets should forecast the cost of such deliverables, and budget negotiations should be based on what the business executives want to buy, not what IT would like to spend.

IT is not prepared to address strategic opportunities with emerging technologies, such as AI, big-data analytics, IoT, and RPA.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Agile does not address the need for engineering groups dedicated to technologies other than than applications and infrastructure.

  • The root cause here is structural. The solution is a restructuring of the IT organization, building on a comprehensive framework of all possible internal lines of business within IT.

There is no assurance IT investments are aligned with enterprise strategies; many programs seem operational, but not relevant to top executives.

ROOT CAUSES:

  • Long-lived Agile teams and scalable frameworks optimizing engineering efficiency, not necessarily business value. They do not provide the flexibility to allocate resources to the initiatives with the best ROI for the enterprise.