What are the top 3 reasons that organizations adopt Agile?
In my experience, organizations choose to adopt Agile for several reasons. I’ll walk you through some of those reasons.
- Achieving more with less.
- Solving operational problems
- Status
Achieving more with less.
In my experience, organizations impose Agile on teams because they have been sold the benefit of achieving more outcomes with less resources and people. Scrum, for example, is built on the value proposition of ‘doing twice the work in half the time’.
In many applications around the world, Agile has proven itself to be incredibly effective at delivering high velocity outcomes with less resources, costs, and teams than traditional project management, and so it is a reasonable and achievable outcome if you get the adoption and implementation right.
Agile solves operational problems
In my experience, a team will actively ask to adopt Agile because they are facing a specific set of problems that traditional project management or traditional styles of working simply can’t solve.
Typically, those problems are:
- Overburdening of teams and individuals
- Slow feedback loops
- Regain a sense of pride in their work. Achieve a sense of accomplishment.
- Wanting to serve a purpose and have an impact on the customers they serve.
As teams encounter greater complexity and uncertainty, the traditional ways of working tend to fall over, and the team benefit a great deal from Empirical Process Control which allows them to discover, experiment, learn, and evolve based on data and evidence rather than opinions and guesswork.
Agile as a badge of honour
A great deal of incredible things have been achieved through agile and business agility frameworks.
Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify… and the list goes on and on.
There are organizations that have created products, features and services that truly delight customers, and that has translated into significant competitive advantage and profits.
As executives and leadership teams read more about these successes, their appetite for change – specifically for Agile ways of working, product development, venture capitalism, etc… – has increased significantly.
The status that comes with being truly responsive, truly adaptive, and truly innovative is a strong beacon that beckons organizations into the world of Agile.
Summary of Agile demand
In all cases, agile has delivered on its promises.
The people who were initially drawn to Agile are the real heroes of the story. Agile, as a concept, and as a framework, holds no intrinsic value unless it is adopted and implemented by teams of people that are committed to doing great work, in meaningful ways, with an obsessive focus on customer satisfaction and delight.
In environments where Agile has simply been deployed as a magic bullet to solve all problems, without the environment actively changing or adopting agile values and principles, have seen stellar failures, and walked down the trough of disillusionment as a consequence.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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