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Humanizing Agile

“Can we get serious now?” quipped Captain Charles Sully Sullenberger, the iconic character played by Tom Hanks in the movie adaptation of the Airbus A320 Hudson Water landing incident. He goes on to articulate the crux of his argument in the safety hearing: “You are taking humanity out of the cockpit while looking for human errors.”

I have a feeling - more from experience - that many of the Agile implementations that are done in organizations suffer from this very same issue: humanity is taken out of Agile. This is a sad irony as Agile by design is meant to amplify people practices. There are several manifestations of this in Agile. Task sign-up, self-organizing teams, servant leadership, a daily Scrum meeting, team retrospective, and various principles are all examples of the human side of Agile.

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Unified Agile-DevOps Transformation Model, Framework and Executable Roadmap for Large Organizations

Abstract

Agile-DevOps transformation and Continuous Delivery became the leading topic and highest priority for senior leadership, stakeholders, teams and customers alike. Agile-DevOps transformation is a fundamental change to the organization's culture, structure, people, and business/technical paradigms towards the next level of agility. It relies on Lean values and principles, and brings the highest level of collaboration, productivity, quality, flexibility and efficiency, cutting-edge technology, and competitive edge to your organization.

While some organizations succeed in their transformations, others fail. Agile-DevOps transformation can be ambiguous, disrupting, misdirecting, and even harmful if executed without the right guidance or led by the wrong people. Transformations primarily fail for two reasons. The first is the lack of a common vision, strategic approach and unified transformation model, framework, and roadmap that inhibits the agreement between change agents, leading to the inability to arrive at a single voice on how to orchestrate and implement change. The other is the agents’ limited knowledge and expertise or a tendency to follow on a previous success path regardless of the organization's uniqueness.

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Reasons for the Failure of Agile in Organization

We often talk about Agile and its benefits in an organization. Everybody knows that using Agile will bring a lot of long-term benefits which can be related to profit, better team, better quality of software, and lot more. Do we ever wonder, though, what the success rate of Agile projects is, and why Agile projects fail?

1. Lack of Management Support

Agile cannot be implemented without the support of management. Let’s discuss two different organizational scenarios for management support in detail: