Why Companies Struggle With Agile and Scrum
Agile methodologies involve new values, practices, principles, and benefits in comparison to traditional Waterfall method. As agile is a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management, its methodologies have spread across various industries and functions and also into the C-suite. National Public Radio(NPR) uses agile methods to create new programmes. One of the leaders in cloud backup services, Intronis, employs agile in marketing. C.H. Robinson is a known third-party logistics provider globally, deploys them in human resources.
The effective implementation allows businesses to take employees out of their functional silos and turning them to self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, speeding up profitable growth and helping to create a new generation of skilled managers.
The general adoption of agile ideas, tools, and frameworks by businesses have happened, but only a few of them are making the most of its benefits by accepting agility as the end goal. Baked into frameworks of agile is risk mitigation. Risk can come in different forms like:
If you are using Scrum, Kanban, XP, or SAFe; it doesn't mean you are appropriately protecting yourself from these risks. This means you are not making the most of benefits. When it comes to traditional SDLCs, they were designed to mitigate risk. The roles of project managers make a difference, ensuring risk mitigation appropriately.
If we talk about flexibility and change; traditional SDLCs usually go too far with control and do not provide expected benefits. I am not saying waterfall is bad, but it requires you know with certainty the end state, the cost to get there, and its time of completion. Any change to the plan risks disrupting the certainty in these variables and the happiness of your customers.
Transition to agile requires the understanding of agile manifesto and its frameworks. This article guides about all the reasons behind the organization's struggle with agile and scrum.
Organizations need to understand that the methods that comprise “Agile” will not solve any pertinent issue in their culture or “the behavior of their employees.” Problems of distrust, lack accountability, respect, or fear of failure are all readily exposed by Scrum( Framework of agile). For instance, the goal of scrum is to produce a potentially releasable product increment in every sprint that often exposes the business to the “technical debt” due to past product development efforts that has not been paid off and lack of quality practices within software engineering.
Most of the organizations are not able to deal with these surfacing issues. As they don’t have a neutral party to facilitate their exploration and resolution, most organizations tend to ignore them or consider Agile/Scrum liable to create them.
One of the co-founders of Scrum, Ken Schwaber, states that Scrum holds a mirror up to the organization.
In case that mirror reflects back, an organization does not like and blames the “mirror” rather than looking at the objectively provided feedback and evaluating to address it.
The scrum involves two concepts empowerment and autonomy and if a team is not functioning independently; there is a problem. According to Michele Sliger, coauthor of The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility and president of Sliger Consulting, it may be that team members don’t understand how to adapt their new roles. Most of the times, it’s an indication that a project manager does not want to give up control.
According to Sliger, " The control freak project managers do not let go of decision making and give no control to the members of team."
What is the result?
When the team members do not feel that they are in charge, they do not accept changes and revert to take orders and prefer to work within their comfort zones, taking them back to waterfall. “Giving ownership to the team will bring accountability,” according to Sliger. Your employees are likely to step back from responsibilities if they feel that they are doing what they are told and the attitude is like, ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys."
What is the way to foster independence?
If you want the effective implementation of agile methodologies, empower your teams to work freely while relaxing them from constant checking of higher-ups or set them free to make decisions and changes. If the project manager can’t cede control, then agile and Scrum training may help them to adapt to their new role in Scrum.
As Agile methods are framework-based; they provide the minimal set of artifacts, roles, and ceremonies essential to create a product frequently. The adoption of these methods allows people to add things to the framework that are beneficial to them. For instance, various teams often leverage practices from Extreme Programming (XP) like Pair programming or Continuous Integration. The additions are accepted because they help teams to become self-organizing that is important in agile.
Sometimes, organizations take advantage of freedom and compromise on the simple set of practices that Scrum advocates. Scrum necessitates on the need for a Product Owner who is knowledgeable, decisive and available to the team, but organizations mostly skip this as they find difficult to search for a suitable person with required skills. Scrum is a framework, and the organizations move forward adopting “Scrum” without a Product Owner. When they struggle, they don’t get the reason for their failure that why they are not realizing the benefits from it as in real they are not practicing it perfectly.
The solution to this struggle is to invest in experienced and dedicated Scrum Masters. A Scrum Master is an unbiased, servant leader who makes sure that Scrum team lives by the values and practices of Scrum. He/She removes impediments to progress, facilitate meetings, and work with the product owner to keep the product backlog in good shape and ready for the next sprint.
Agile is worth investing the effort and time in for your company. You just need to practice it correctly, and it will become easy to incorporate it into an existing company framework. A business can expect to have a bumpy road with some developers, and it remains for some time, and your business will soon realize its benefits after its proper implementation.
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