Agile Isn't a Band-Aid: How Agile Can Hurt Teams
How and when you implement agile might be more dependent on its success within your team than you might think. If you bring in an agile coach and methodically take all the right steps toward transforming your team into a faster, more iterative group, it’s very likely that agile will work for you.
However, if you find that your projects are struggling and turn to agile as a Band-Aid, of sorts, in order to quickly fix what looks to be an eventual disaster, the results might not be as positive as you’d hope. Agile processes designed to replace waterfall have a tendency to be flawed, and Sam Atkinson outlines why in a recent article for DevOps Zone.
The most common issues tend to be:
- Two-week sprints that still have large release cycles
- Kanban and scrum boards that are consistently out of date
- Multi-hour estimate meetings that are redone each sprint
- Half-hour sit-down/stand-ups purely for the purpose of updating management
It’s great to be agile if agile is 1) Done properly and 2) The right fit for your team, but if you quickly cobble an agile solution together and don’t consider how all of the pieces fit together, you could find yourself in a worse situation than before.
What are some reasons that agile might fail? If a few members of your team aren’t fully onboard, or if you find yourself with new staff members replacing existing ones on a regular basis, camaraderie will be difficult to establish. Additionally, if you let bugs linger or don’t allow adequate time for certain steps of the process, your agile team will lose much of its potency.
Even the lingo of agile can be confusing for teams trying to make the transition, and if half of your team is constantly using terms like “scrum,” “sprints,” and “points” while the other half hasn’t fully adjusted, you’ll likely find yourself with disjointed messages and projects. Once again, you can’t have one foot in agile and one foot out—if you’re going to make the transition, you have to commit.
Agile isn’t easy. You can scoff at that notion and assume agile is something you can quickly implement to save projects or even entire organizations, but according to Coveros CEO and agile instructor, Jeff Payne, change takes time.
“Agile transformation it is change, and it’s real change, and it’s the kind of change that does take time,” Payne tells Agileconnection. “It’s not going to happen overnight. Like any change in the organization, it will take time and it’s hard.”
