People don't think in systems

Since most organisations are structured in departments and functions, the impact of this siloed focus is that most agile implementations actually turn into Water-Scrum-Fall. To gather more data, I ran a poll on LinkedIn to gauge why people felt that this happened in their place of work.

The Question: Why Do Agile Implementations Turn into Agile-Scrum-Fall

The Results

31% blamed a lack of framework support.
29% blamed the implementation being too dev focused.
24% blamed bad faith implementations, and the remaining.
And the remaining 16% commented with a range of different answers, mostly along the lines of needing to implement the agile mindset and empower people.

But if we dig into that data a little further, the poll gets more interesting. Rather than looking at the answers as a single group, I separated people into whether they are delivery-focused or management-focused.

People in delivery roles believed that the dev focus of agile frameworks was the biggest cause, whereas people in management roles focused more on the lack of framework support.

Rationale

The separation between roles makes sense given the areas of responsibility for each party. Developers are missing out on support for “what to build” because the frameworks focus on “how to build”, whereas management is concerned with how to structure teams, ensure they are aligned, implementing governance models that empower rather than disempower and how to fund teams.

Both parties are correct. You need to solve both sets of problems to have an effective way of working. The challenge is that you need to solve the problems in parallel.

So what extra support should frameworks provide?

The biggest vote was for extra support from frameworks, so I wanted to dig into what areas people felt were lacking. I decided to go back and run another poll. I split the poll into four improvement areas:
Idea Generation (Discovery)
Management (Governance, Funding),
Scaling (Structures, Alignment) and
All of the Above.

All of the above was the clear winner, but I wanted to dig into the other answers to see if we could spot any trends. Again, I segmented the answers by job role to gather better insights. This is where my findings got even more interesting.

If you ever want to see proof of the difference between project and product management here you go…

The Product Managers are much more focused on identifying the best solutions to build so they were much more in favour of support around idea generation, whereas the project managers are focused more on delivery so they favoured scaling support that would help with alignment, because the biggest blockers to delivery are often related to getting multiple teams aligned.

Another interesting result was the difference between people within development roles and those in management roles. Both groups saw the most benefit in support for idea generation, but surprisingly the developers were much more in favour of governance and funding support whereas management wanted support for structures and alignment at scale.

This makes sense when you realise that developers tend not to be involved in the scaling challenges but they are heavily impacted by the governance and funding processes that lock in a scope too early.

The Issues are known, the priorities are the problem

The good news is that most people recognise that there are issues that need to be resolved across the board. The challenge is how to help people to adopt changes.

I firmly believe that trying to motivate people is a fools errand. We’ve tried that approach for years and we ended up with Water-Scrum-Fall implementations. Change can also happen if you make it easy to adopt the new ways of working. But to make such systemic changes easy you need alignment across the organisation around both the problems to be solved as well as the approach to solving them.

If we are serious about improving our ways of working, we will need a more system-thinking approach to the entire way of working. That is how we will enable companies to be responsive to the ever-changing needs of our customers and the market.