Transcript
[Announcer] This is Mike Cottmeyer’s talk from AgileIndy, 2021 on “Why Agile Transformation Fails.”
– Okay, so we’re gonna talk about today is this thing I call “Executives Guide to Why Agile Transformations Fail.” And if you’ve been following my stuff, there’s really kind of a fascinating evolution of this story. So I got involved with agile back in like 2003 and I was working in this company called CheckFree. We were doing like large online banking bill payment kinds of things. And so my indoctrination to agile was never ever in the small. It was always large-scale agile stuff. And I was working for this VP that was like really super cool, is very into agile and we were coming up with really creative things for like team formation strategies and agile governance, all stuff. And this was like way before the days Dean Leffingwell hadn’t even written his first book on scaling. None of the stuff on scaling was out there. So we’re inventing scaling models and really trying to bring this. It was like these four or 500 people, this organization through an Agile Transformation. And so I started writing about multi-tier models and different teaming strategies and things like that and then I went to go work for version one for a couple of years. You guys remember them? It feels like I talk about them and I don’t even think they exist as a thing anymore. Version one CollabNet or something, I guess I call them now. So anyway, kind of a different company, but worked there probably about 10, 12 years ago and was going into a bunch of different organizations that were trying to adopt agile. And then the process developed a point of view around kind of why companies were jacking it up. And so I did talk on the three things and then we came up with this talk. It was just why agile fails. And the hypothesis behind that rev of why agile fails was largely about people trying to adopt practices of agile, and whether it’d be Scrum or extreme programming or now SAFe or LeSS or disciplined agile delivery, something like that, trying to adopt the practices of agile without the words I would use now, but I wouldn’t use them, the business architecture necessary for those practices to work.