More and more organisations are adopting agile delivery methodologies in answer to demands from customers to deliver change faster and at a lower cost. However, there is much scepticism within the agile community as to whether organisations are achieving the benefits they desire. Mark Flynn of Baringa Partners argues that to achieve agile success, organisations first need to understand the core objectives of being ‘agile’, and then establish whether it’s the right approach for them.
In our experience, most of the problems that occur on agile projects are largely caused by the fact that organisations fail to understand the core objectives of being agile. It is widely believed that by using an agile methodology, projects by their very nature will require less time, less cost and will be less risky. This is an incorrect and costly assumption to make.
For many organisations, being agile requires significant culture and process changes that cannot be brought about by solely implementing an agile methodology. True agility requires that you challenge existing processes, management hierarchies and governance forums - something which many companies are often reluctant to do.
As a consultancy focused on helping our clients to achieve delivery excellence, we have been privileged to work with some of the world’s largest businesses. Through our engagements we have experienced a number of flavours of agile – the good, the bad and the ugly.
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