What are your pain points?

Simple but difficult

Scrum and Agile development turn out to be much harder than we anticipate. Teams unfamiliar with the true nature of Agile development try to implement the practices, but often fail to gain meaningful results. As a result, confidence, enthusiasm and support wanes. Stakeholders who have been sold on the idea that Agile will solve their problems discover that it mostly exposes them. When extended parts of the organization work in a different (i.e. non-agile) manner, their lack of support pulls the adopting team back to old behavior. Some people in the organization may lack the training, coaching, involvement and motivation to get behind Agile. Others misunderstand it or feel exposed by working in such an open style. Pockets of resistance emerge.

Distributed teams (sites) compound the difficulty of learning and adopting a highly collaborative style of work. Teams often drop or irreparably alter the implementation to accommodate the challenges of geographic distribution, and dilute the effectiveness of the agile development. Stakeholders and management, programmed by years of conditioning, insist on fixed scope and fixed timeline, making absolute predictability the only acceptable answer. Some teams lack the ability or permission to self-select their own work norms. Some stakeholders lack the empowerment to adjust the priorities and scope of project requirements. The net result is considerable difficulty in implementing something that appears, on the surface, to be simple.

Common pain points

The most common difficulties experienced by organizations struggling to adopt agile development include:

• Practices are not sticky (after the coaching/push stops)
• The methods have changed but we're not seeing increased throughput
• Staff and management not taking ownership of the outcome
• There are several pockets of resistance among the staff
• Not sure how to scale
• Quality: seeing an ever-growing backlog of defects
• Uncertainty on how to manage a portfolio of Agile development projects