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12

JUL

Why do agile projects fail?

12 JUL 2012 | Posted in agile development, project failure | Author Stan Wade | 2 Comments

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I was in a meeting a few days ago and a customer of mine who is a deep believer in agile development mentioned an article he had on the top 10 reasons agile projects fail. I had probably already read it, but it still sounded interesting so I had a quick search and of course found a number of top ten lists published, so….I read them all.

There was quite a bit of commonality and in general the following issues were highlighted:

• Poor/Lack of Business leadership
• Poor scrum master/ team leadership
• Lack of business engagement
• Poor decision making process
• Poor learning culture/ retrospective process
• Poor communications
• Lack of transparency
• Lack of skilled support on site
• Lack of team focus / Commitment
• Requirements management and scope creep
• Poor completion criteria

These are all reasonable statements and I can remember examples of all of these on projects I have been involved in. However what I was rather surprised not to see was anything about poor project initiation and lack of appropriate up front planning. Are we happy to dive in on day one and start coding without any design or preparation? I certainly have found evidence on blogs that some people believe that this is ‘agile purity’ and they don’t like it. So why do it?

I think poor project initiation/initial planning is a significant reason why projects can fail. Failure to identify uncertainty and decide how to manage it is the ‘running into a dark room clutching a pair of scissors’ scenario. I accept there is a risk of getting the amount of up front planning and design ‘right’ is a challenge, but I am pretty sure it’s rarely zero.

Effective project initiation is key to success and cannot be left to a Sprint 0 or a ‘we will do it as we go’ some things are simply too big and dangerous to ignore and hope they will just go away or work out in the wash.