Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

25

APR

Crossing the Chasm

25 APR 2012 | Posted in ADAPT, agile adoption, agility | Author John Wright | 1 Comment

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Ok, so its probably an over-used senior management phrase, but I can't help but think adopting Agile is a bit like starting up and growing your own business.

When someone has a new idea for a business, they usually start small, figure out the rules of business, find out what they need to do to make their business work, identify their market, tailor their product, get the pricing right, identify how to sell their product, win some business, re-invest the learning and profits into the business to help it grow.

As businesses grow they get to that point when it gets hard to expand without a shift in attitude, increasing the scale of production, tackling the recruitment and HR issues, trying to do things more efficiently and stay profitable.

It's during this phase of a business's growth a number of things can happen. They might shrink back to a smaller more manageable business if things get a bit tough. They might fail completely by making the wrong decisions and choices as they try to do too much too quickly. The might get lucky and succeed without really knowing how. They might seek advice from people who have succeeded in the past and use their experience to minimise the risks associated with growth.

So, what's this got to do with Agile?

Well, many companies start small, read all the books on Scrum, try pilot projects, create a co-located team, create a prioritised backlog, run stand-ups, deliver things incrementally, provide value to the business they work for.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting this approach is wrong, it's just where most companies start.

Once an organisation sees some success in using Agile, they try to replicate the same process, they come across the pain of trying to maintain agility on larger programmes of work, they try different ways of trying to adapt their working process to a bigger challenge.

So what happens next?

Some organisations find it all a bit too difficult, and continue to run some small Agile projects, but are quite restrictive in the size and type of project the use Agile on. Some organisations get burnt tackling bigger Agile projects and then give up altogether. Some organisations get lucky and find something that works for them first time and work in an environment that encourages agility across the organisation. Some organisations seek help from people that have succeeded before, think about the challenge, line up the organisation to take on and encourage agility across the whole business and build capability across the company that supports business flexibility that enables their organisation to truly benefit from a dynamic approach to delivering IT to support their business.

Are you ready to cross the chasm?