CIOs, CTOs, and Digital Trailblazers – we have a problem.
While many organizations have adopted agile methodologies, there’s a gap
between what leaders expect from these practices and what they deliver. This
year’s State of Agile report (the
17th of their annual reports) shows the gap is widening and
points to some of the underlying issues for technology leaders and
Digital Trailblazers
to address.
The gap stems from the different needs and expectations between those
practicing agile (in IT, these include product owners, developers, and
engineers), those providing agile guidance (including agile coaches, scrum
masters, project managers, and program managers), and business leaders
(including CIO/CTO, product managers, business stakeholders, and other
business executives.)
The survey is skewed, with 57% of respondents coming from agile guidance
roles and only 10% from business leadership roles. You would expect agile
supporters to tilt the results toward more enthusiasm, but the survey hints
at several underlying issues, especially in larger organizations. CIOs
should read into this as a clear signal – we have to do better, especially
for CIOs embracing agile methodologies to drive digial transformation.
This post is for pioneering CIOs and Digital Trailblazers who view agile as
a
core digital transformation organizational competency. If your view is that agile is only a program management methodology or a
process best left for dev teams, then there are some practical ways to
support continuous improvements in execution and productivity. Just don’t
expect transformational results.
But for the Digital Trailblazers, below are three takeaways from this survey
with my recommendations.
1. Leading agile transformation? Recruit business leader participation
CIOs should take a top-of-stadium-down view of how leadership and teams
drive digital transformation. If you surveyed business leaders and
employees, what processes underpin the transformation? Will they say agile
is one of the key foundational ones, and how many leaders participate in
agile practices and culture change?
“Product management, agile development, DevOps, and proactive data
governance are digital transformation’s building blocks,” I wrote in my
book,
Digital Trailblazer. What’s key to all these practices is that transformation is driven by
business, data, and technology collaboration.
The State of Agile reports that only 32% say business leaders are actively
leading and participating in company-wide agile transformations, and 20% say
agile transformation is led by the office of the CIO/CTO only. This suggests
that at least 48% of respondents don’t believe there’s sufficient business
leader participation for agile practices to be a transformation driver.
Recommendations: Bringing business leaders onto the agile
transformation bus requires more than a one-time ask – it requires ongoing
learning and engagement. I’ve previously written about ways to
develop relationships with business stakeholders
and
five steps for explaining agile planning to them. I also have an
entry-level class,
Everyone Can Be Agile, designed to help business leaders quickly learn about agile
methodologies.
2. What’s not working with agile? Ask your team
Some CIOs/CTOs, especially those with application development backgrounds,
are strong, enthusiastic sponsors of agile programs. Others who may have
started their careers in IT operations or practiced more traditional project
management methodologies are learning through observation. So when there are
execution gaps, unhappy stakeholders, or questions about productivity, will
CIOs/CTOs have enough agile experience to aid their coaches and scrum
masters?
The survey points to several areas where agile coaches and scrum masters
need help:
- 71% of last year’s survey respondents (2022) were either very or somewhat satisfied with agile, but satisfaction dropped to 59% in this year’s (2023) survey.
- Only 52% report that enterprise agile works very or somewhat well. That number drops to 43% in large companies where “scaling agile” is most needed, and 30% of large-company respondents say enterprise agile is not working well.
- The top two reasons the business isn’t adopting agile are resistance to change (47%) and insufficient leadership participation (41%).
Some context: 26% of respondents report using SAFe and 19% Scrum@Scale,
while 22% don’t follow an enterprise-level framework and 12% created their
own.
What’s most important is to understand your organization’s context and where
your agile guides are struggling. Coaches may point to gaps – the framework
says to do X, but the teams aren’t adopting it. My question would be, is the
framework working for you, or are you working for it? I applaud the 12% who
recognize that agile standards are organization-specific and that its people
drive cultures/mindsets. Without active leadership, growing an
organization-wide agile culture and developing experimental mindsets don’t
happen.
Recommendations: Many frameworks emphasize rituals, but in my
experience, it’s more important to understand and address the behaviors that
can hurt or promote
agile cultures and mindsets. I also believe that Digital Trailblazers should learn from
agile best practices
and then adopt
agile ways of working
that work for their organizational goals. Agile principles are best
established in different layers, from
enterprise self-organizing standards
down to agile team empowerment.
3. Write a vision statement for agile transformation
The survey also shows a disconnect between goals in adopting agile compared
to what it may be delivering in many organizations.
According to the survey, organizations chose agile practices to deliver
incremental customer and business value (41%), accelerate time to market
(41%), and drive digital transformation (34%). However, respondents who are
happy with agile practices report that agile delivers increased
collaboration (59%) and better alignment to business needs (57%). In
contrast, only 18% of the happy group said agile enables faster response to
competitive threats, and 14% say it improves user experiences.
The issue here is that agile is driven by three different personas –
practitioners, guides, and business leaders – each with different levels of
understanding and goals. As I noted earlier, it’s hard to drive customer and
business benefits when executives aren’t involved in the transformation. And
when agile guides drive agile adoption without executive feedback, they’ll
report on benefits most visible to them, such as collaboration.
Another related data point from the survey is how teams evaluate the success
of software development and delivery, with 17% unsure of what metrics are in
place and only 29% conducting end-user or customer surveys.
All transformations are investments, so leaders and teams must define
objectives, success criteria, and metrics when they seek continuous
improvements.
Recommendations: When embarking on an agile transformation, I always
begin the process by facilitating the writing of a
vision statement
that lists the transformation’s customers, value propositions, why the
transformation is important, and its success criteria. For metrics, I
recommend starting with
digital KPIs
that measure velocity, including time to value, time to data, and time to
decision, and considering
my most important agile KPI. Also, it’s important to develop agile
feedback loops
that should include customer surveys.
Review this year’s State of Agile as it has other data points on agile tools, AI adoption, and applying agile practices in customer service, marketing, and other departments.
Digital Trailblazers! Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital
transformation topics: innovation, product management, agile, DevOps,
data governance, and more!
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