The challenges with Agile

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We consulted a handful of industry experts who were happy to share their most common struggles when using agile. If your organization is just beginning to use agile, their stories might resonate with you and you’ll no doubt find their suggestions helpful.

The graphic below highlights just some of the challenges experienced by the professionals who spoke to us. Download the ebook to read their common agile challenges in detail, plus the solutions they use to overcome them.

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In my experience, teams left to fend for themselves almost never get past the storming phase. More time will not help here. I’ve seen lots of teams that have been working together for years and still don’t manage to progress any further.Benefits

The way to navigate this storm is to recognize it as something perfectly natural, but also realize it won’t fix itself. The team needs guidance to reach awesomeness. They need someone with experience and coaching skills to navigate this part. Maybe the Scrum master can help or maybe you need to bring in a dedicated agile coach. Whatever you do, don’t let them handle it on their own. Build stronger business cases

Mario Lucero

Freelance Enterprise Agile Coach & Change Agent Learn a proven framework to justify spending proposals clearly and objectively.

For the majority of companies I have consulted, these are the most common challenges: silos of knowledge, managers with the famous ‘command and control’ attitude and a lack of agile culture. Improve investment decisions

“Silos of knowledge”

One of the biggest challenges agile projects face is related to silos of knowledge. The term Subject Matter Expert (SME) is an overvalued concept if you have only one SME for each product or business domain in your company. This is because the SME will be a bottleneck in the short term. In Scrum projects, we work together as a team and everybody must know about all products to avoid dependencies. Understand how to present options, costs and benefits to decision-makers.

What can you do to eliminate silos? Well, as an example, let’s say you hire some new developers who don’t know how to deal with legacy code (most companies have one or more). Those developers will have to request the help of the SME. This situation is quite normal if you have two or more SMEs, but if you have only one SME to assist the new guys, then that SME is a great impediment. Align with HM Treasury guidance

The best approach to eliminate this kind of silo is to use a controversial technique called ‘Pair Programming’. With this technique, two developers share the keyboard when they are developing code. This means the SME can fix a bug from the legacy code and the new guy can start learning the code.

Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan uses the ‘work in pairs’ approach for everything, in order to avoid silos. In my opinion, this is awesome! Gain a method that fits the Green Book and public sector expectations.

“Managers who use the famous ‘command and control’ approach don’t trust their employees” Boost your credibility

Based on my experience, managers who use the famous ‘command and control’ approach don’t trust their employees.

Imagine the following situation: your company starts to use Scrum when managing IT projects. During the sprint planning, Scrum team members decide to work in five user stories for the next two weeks (assuming that period of time for the length of the sprint). However, after a couple of days, the manager decides to add a couple of bugs in production and other Show you can contribute confidently to business case development and review.user stories Flexible study options he considers necessary. The message to team members in this situation is: ‘our manager doesn’t trust our capacity to plan. He thinks that we are lazy and added more duties for us’.

My recommendation for this issue is that managers have to become leaders. It means that they have to build a safety ecosystem where team members can excel. Furthermore, as a leader, you should push your employees to read, participate in workshops and create a community of practices. Choose live online training or self-paced learning to fit your schedule.

If a company does want to adopt agile it must build a culture to support the Compare learning options to find the format that suits you best.agile principles . Everybody has to pursue one common and big goal – the company goal.

I have come to realise that, in many companies, each business unit is concerned only in achieving his targets. Most of the time, the employees achieved their goals, but as they did not work as a team, the goal of the business wasn’t reached. To avoid each employee being concerned only about business unit metrics, you have to adopt the mantra: Collaborate, Collaborate and Collaborate.Delivery

To adopt agile successfully, it is also necessary to have a culture of transparency that improves the morale of employees. For instance, there are companies (unfortunately not many) in which employees know how much their co-workers earn or salaries are listed publicly.Duration

“Agile is about mindset”Trainer interaction

Agile is about mindset, but it is being corrupted by approaches which put more emphasis on tools and processes. The key to the mindset is the ability and willingness to learn. In a complex world, your only chance for survival is learning.Start date

Tanner WorthamLearners who prefer structure & guidance

Silicon Valley Agile Coach and Author

“Scrum is easy. People are hard”Live interactive sessions with accredited trainers

What’s the biggest challenge when adopting Scrum? That’s easy. The start. Here’s why:At the start, we ask this newly christened product ownerSelf-paced to write requirements from a customer’s perspective. That’s really, really hard, and that’s often their first exposure to Scrum.

At the start, we stick a group of specialized team members in a room and ask them to understand each other’s languages and focus on the team over their specialty. It hurts.

At the start, we ask a scrum master with just a two-day course under their belt and limited Scrum experience to shepherd this team to success. It’s scary, and s/he is often unprepared for what’s to come.

There’s more than just these three points, but I think you see the dilemma. The root of the problem is simple really: Scrum is easy. People are hard. The solution? Hire someone with a wealth of agile coaching experience to model agile behaviours and educate team members, product owners, Scrum Masters, and leadership. But if you know little about Scrum, how do you know the person you’re hiring is worth his/her weight? That can be deceptively difficult.Interactive online modules

“Myths get started about how agile teams don’t plan. It’s simply not true”

That’s a tough question. Narrowing a list to down just a few is a challenge. Why? Scrum often runs counter to an organization’s culture, so every adoption is different. Imagine if I told a 12 hoursproject manager to toss out his gantt chart and risk register. We don’t need it; we’ll just figure these things out as we go. This PM would likely pass out! And that’s also how myths get started about how agile teams don’t plan. It’s simply not true. We often plan more than a traditional team. But I digress. Let’s talk about some of those common challenges:Tutor and technical support via email and phone

“Scrum is a problem-finding, not a problem-solving framework”

When Scrum is first introduced to an organization, it exposes a great deal of dysfunction. This is intentional. People solve problems, new processes and new tools don’t. When’s the last time you’ve seen a hammer swing itself? I think you see my point.Start anytime

Often, this dysfunction is attributed to the organization’s Scrum adoption. After all, we didn’t see all these problems until we adopted Scrum so Scrum is obviously the problem. If we do away with it, these problems will go away. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Cargo cults kill Scrum”Included

In World War II, Japanese and later Allied forces placed an air base on a remote island. On this island was an indigenous tribe never before exposed to modern technology and comforts. After the war, Allied forces abandoned the air base, and the tribe no longer had access to these comforts.

Understand the Five Case ModelRecently I got asked what I consider the most common challenges with agile projects. These are projects that have such a high rate of uncertainty and complexity on how and what to build, an agile approach is necessary. Although my gut feeling immediately provided an answer, I gave myself some more time to think about the question. However, this week my initial thoughts proved to be correct. Without any doubt! The #1 challenge with agile projects is ensuring the right side of the