Retrospective on Agile Organizational Transformations: challenges to adoption

Abstract:
Agile transformations often fail or don’t deliver full benefits in large organizations. Lack of understanding of agile principles especially by management team leads to thinking that agile is only for development teams rather than an enterprise thought process. Despite development team using technical excellence practices (TDD, Pair Programming, Continuous Integration etc.) to produce quality deliverable the other part of the organization limits the benefit of agile by not adopting agile mindset. Often large organizations find difficult to implement agile principle & values because of its existing corporate structure, culture, mindset and lack of commitment from executive teams to support the agile transformation. 

Agile transformation started from bottom-up get some good initial success but derails later due to organizational constraints. Organization culture that promotes deep hierarchical (and dysfunctional) structure, political environment, policies (not aligned towards employee empowerment) and individual reward structures are often main reason stated by most of the fail agile transformations teams. The successful agile transformation initiatives are led by people right from the top CxO layer by putting “commitment before success” formula and supported by middle management using servant leader relationship to bring whole organization gradually towards agility to make organizations being agile rather doing agile.  

This is a series of article that I will continue writing on my blog and in each article will target few related reason for failed Agile transformations. Please watch this space...