Why Agile in the Enterprise is hard, and how to make it Easier – Multiple Stakeholders

I’ll get straight to the point, there are several reasons, and I’m going to focus this post on one primary reason. It goes like this

• Agile is optimized when there is a single product owner that can own and prioritize the backlog.
• In an enterprise, there are multiple stakeholders often with different priorities and different (sometime conflicting) needs around specific enhancements.
• Enhancements often touch legacy systems and upgrading/transforming these can unravel a tricky landscape of dependencies.

So it’s hard for a product owner to maintain a backlog when they must negotiate the landscape of conflicting priorities and technology dependencies.

Elements of a Fix

The “fix” to these issues is not trivial and takes some time to sort out with business leaders and other stakeholders. Elements of the fix

• You need to define roles and responsibilities around several planning functions and especially Agile’s notion of a product owner with traditional roles like product management, project management, and business analysts. This series on Product Owner / Product Manager is a good read on managing these two roles in an enterprise.
  
• Backlog creation and prioritization needs to mature to a transparent process, not a process directly controlled by the product owner.
• Stakeholders must be educated on the agile process and interfacing with it. Think about tools for onboarding work, wikis for collaboration, etc.
• Recognize if/when specific people in the organization are having difficulty working with, understanding, or engaging an agile (e.g. non-waterfall) ‘hands on’ process.

Hope this helps! Comment here if you want me to elaborate on any items.