by Agile failure modes and alternatives
- Agile practices don’t fail—rather the variations on Agile adoption fail”.
- You must know what not to do while following certain practices in agile.
- There is no term like 99% agile.
- You are 100% agile or you are not.
Some Agile failure modes and alternatives
- Check book commitment doesn’t support organizational change management.
- CEOs create within the company their own personal family dysfunction.
- Culture doesn’t support change.
- Reward plan, and a static and prescriptive standard of work.
- Try to keep cross-organizational uniformity and use PMO as enforcers.
- Do not have Retrospective, or they are bad.
- Actions which come out get ignored or written off.
- In a race to finish features, the infrastructure gets worse and architecture becomes unstable.
- Distributed teams make this worse.
- Lack of collaboration in planning.
- Like having the whole team for release planning.
- None or too many Product Owners.
- Both cases look the same.Agile is yet another hat to wear and the person is already too busy.
- They check out and ask the team to just do Agile.
- Can’t get past the ‘this sucks’ phase of adoption if the business is not bought in.
- Bad Scrum Master which uses a command and control style with the team to look faster, yet in reality slows things down.
- Low morale lowers IQ (Intelligence Quotient).
- Take decisions away and it actually makes people stupider!
- No on-site evangelist.
- If the teams are distributed, need one at every site.
- Can’t reap the benefits of Agile or offshore without an on-site coach at each location.
- No solid team.
- Actually missed this one, inferred.
- Empowered teams amplify learning.
- Tsunami of Technical Debt if don’t pull tests forward.
- Traditional performance appraisals.
- Individual heroics rewarded, glad you’re not a team player!
- Revert to traditional.
- Change is hard.
- Hit the threshold where this sucks.
- Revert back to old ways of doing business.
Agile failure modes and alternatives
- The top 12 causes of agile failure (failure modes) according to Aaron Sanders:
- 1. A checkbook commitment doesn’t automatically cause organizational change or support.
- 2. Culture doesn’t support change.
- 3. Culture does not have retrospectives or performs them poorly.
- 4. Standards and quality are lost in a race to project closing.
- 5.Lack of collaboration in planning.
- 6.None or too many Product Owners.
- 7. Poor project leadership or Scrum Master that doesn’t place trust in the team and allow it to be Self-Organizing and self-disciplined.
- 8.No on-site agile promoter or coach.
- 9.Lack of a well built, high-performance team.
- 10.Accrued Technical Debt if strict testing Standards are not upheld.
- 11.Culture maintains traditional performance appraisals where individuals are honored and the team aspect is lost.
- 12.A reversion to the traditional or ‘old-way’ of doing business occurs because change is hard.
- [Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa Adkins.]
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