These facts are holding back your agile adoption.

Once in a while, I see something, and it inspires me.  I get fired up and feel like ranting into the night like some crazed deviant looking for windmills to joust.  This week, I had one of those moments, and it steeled my resolve.  I am an Agile professional who wants to help change how people work.  

It all began when I read a fantastic blog post from Isaac Socolick about Legacy thinking versus Agile thinking.  This got me thinking.  It has been fifteen years since the Agile manifesto, and plenty of business organizations struggle to adapt to the new paradigm of business.  I have been part of this effort for the last six years.  Why is change so difficult for these organizations? I have a few hunches.

Legacy Funding of projects-

In large organizations, products are funded on a limited basis.  Teams are funded, spun up, and then wound down once the project is completed.  This is a standard waterfall approach.  Once the project is completed then, it is folded into the support stack of the organization to be forgotten.  No consideration for Net Present Value is made.  Often, input for what the customer wants is ignored, and the project is seen as a test for a project manager or executive who wants to advance.  Finally, the process is managed not by operations people who understand the business but by accountants and CPAs who understand pushing money around the firm.  So projects are funded with a thrown-together team, with a defined deadline, and with limited customer input.  No wonder projects fail so often in corporate settings.

Quid Pro Quo behavior –

I have mentioned this before in this blog , but bureaucratic organizations are organized around rules and favors.  The rules are covered by regulatory compliance and standard practices in the organization.  Favors are people deliberately circumventing those rules to accomplish something.  This sets up a system of favors that makes the Tammany Hall politicians of the nineteenth century look like pikers.

This forces business leaders to trade favors with each other to accomplish personal and business goals.  Many of these favors happen under the noses of leadership because exposing these favors would open the firm up to scrutiny from regulators or, worse, upper management.  So what happens is a “Tit for Tat” or Quid Pro Quo culture where executives do favors for each other rather than focusing on the customer.

Ego Driven leadership – 

A new business leader has emerged since Lee Iacocca took Chrysler in the early 1980s.  This was the business person and celebrity.  They were in the company commercials.  They spoke for the company when asked to testify to Congress, and they behaved like monarchs running their business empires with imperial control.  Unfortunately for every, Lee Iacocca, there were numerous failures, such as Carly Fiorina, Al Dunlap, and the most infamous Ken Lay,who transformed Enron into securities fraud and criminal organization.

People seeing this trend in business decided to jump on this bandwagon.  These executives in training began worrying about their brand rather than how they would run the business.  They discovered with a few accounting tricks, they could cover up poor sales, a lack of customer service, and poor innovation.  They further burnished their credentials by leading legacy-style projects, which improved their brand but did not help the business.  Developers have had a name for this for years; they call it "ego-driven development."  Well, ego-driven leadership is the byproduct, and it is hurting businesses all over the world.

I got involved in Agile and its reformation in business for six years.  I have the enthusiasm of a new convert, but I know that trends like the above will hold back the necessary progress we are trying to achieve.  We need to expose these obstacles to remove them.

Until next time.