“I remember the first time I saw Agile in the wild. It was almost magical,” starts Charles Araujo, founder of The Institute for Digital Transformation, in his recent whitepaper on reimagining Agile. Since then, Charles has witnessed how Agile can break down in large, enterprise organizations. He has explored why customer-centricity is the key to scaling Agile, and how organizations can reimagine their development strategy to realize Agile’s transformational power.
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Charles to pick his brain on why he felt most enterprises were failing in their Agile transformations. Charles explains that the concept of Agile is viewed very differently from company to company. For many organizations, moving to Agile is filled with promise – it’s a new way to improve speed to market and differentiate themselves from their competition. While to others, it’s nothing more than a trend that will one-day crumble to the same forces that caused the demise of Waterfall.
However, both ways of thinking are neither completely right, nor wrong. Many Agile principals are failing because companies are unable to, or refuse to, adapt. Simply put, they haven’t made the necessary changes to their people, processes, or tools to be successful.
Traditional Agile tools and principals were originally designed for small teams. Some leaders have even gone so far as to say that Agile methodologies are unequipped to deal with large, complex IT initiatives, especially considering the compliance and regulatory standards enterprises are faced with today. To their point, on average more than 44% of Agile projects fail due to poor communication and a lack of alignment between their numerous, and often siloed, teams.
Although the statistics should not be ignored, it is this type of thinking that has stopped many companies from fully investing in Agile. It has crippled organizations, leaving them short of reaching their true digital transformation potential. The success and failure of an Agile organization is fundamentally determined by their ability to adapt.
You may be asking yourself how your organization can adapt, or what changes you need to make to your people, processes, and technology to be successful in the next wave of enterprise Agility. Charles may have the answer, but are you willing to hear it?
Click here to download your copy of Reimagining Agile for the Enterprise and learn how to address the organizational, cultural, and technological needs of Agile at scale.
