From the course: Agile Foundations

Major agile challenges

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Major agile challenges

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- There are a lot of challenges that come with embracing a more Agile mindset, but the biggest challenge in large organizations is underestimating how radical this transformation can be. This isn't really one challenge as much as it's a group of common challenges. You can get a sense of this challenge by looking at how many changes your organization has made. If you have the same people doing the same things, just with more Agile-sounding names, then you probably aren't making significant changes. Your organization should be a little anxious about the changes, and generally, organizations don't like to be anxious. But if you think about it, there are a lot of big changes. Your organization will need to step away from long-term detailed plans. Instead, they need to inspect and adapt. If you're a long-time project manager, this idea should make you pretty uncomfortable. You've probably spent years, or even decades, trying to stamp out all the uncertainty. If you want to embrace a more Agile mindset, then you have to change your whole relationship with uncertainty. Instead of trying to stamp it out, you need to see it as a competitive advantage. You can improve your product if your Agile team adapts faster than your competitors. If you're a business analyst, then you have to change the way you think about the product. It might seem natural to come up with your own requirements and then hand it off to the team. An Agile team is different. Here, you have to work hand in hand with the team to deliver your product. There isn't any handoff. Instead, your team and their team are the same team. That might make you uncomfortable because in the past there were very clear lines of responsibility, but an Agile team mixes up these lines. Finally, if you're a manager, you have to change the way you receive status updates. You might be used to a one-page weekly status report. It shows if your project is on time and under budget. An Agile team doesn't communicate with reports. Instead, the team communicates with working software. That means that you'll want to attend frequent sprint reviews and give direct feedback about the product. For most organizations, these changes will all be very difficult, and you shouldn't underestimate how much different they are from the status quo. I've seen many organizations try to split the difference. They'll do a little bit of changing and hope for some process improvement. When they do that, they're almost always disappointed. That's because Agile is a radical change in your organizational mindset. If you're not thinking about the product differently, then you're probably not going to get that much benefit from many small changes.

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