3 Biggest Mistakes in Adopting Agile

Agile methodologies can save time, increase business, and create a high-quality product, but it’s not a silver bullet. Agile will not bend space or time and allow you to deliver more work than is possible within the constraints of limited time, budget, and resources.

The biggest problem moving to agile is not adopting the mindset of agile. Just reading and adopting is not going to work, and this is the reason why companies make mistakes in adopting agile.

For instance, a company/startup is using Scrum for software development and they are not using automation. Due to this, they are not able to be productive and start blaming Scrum. It is similar to driving a sports car on a bumpy track and in the end, you blame the car for its speed.

Let’s look at the common mistakes which companies make while adopting agile.
 

Agile is not just a software development methodology, but it is a change in mentality. It is a change in the organization’s culture and this is one of the most important and difficult things to do.

This is also one of the reasons that make agile adoption, challenging in big organizations with different hierarchy levels. If a specific team is agile and the hierarchies above don’t have the agile mindset, it’s not going to work.

A specific example is that managers take the role of scrum masters and they don’t become team coaches. Or the management team uses the scrum master to get more and more work done in a single team.

So unless the mindset is right, the team won’t be truly agile and all the failures will be blamed on the agile methodologies.

An executive reads an article about the benefits of agile or attends a session with a trainer. He directs his teams to become agile right away and adopt all agile practices right away.

It is going to be a disaster, trust me you are soon in a position where you don’t know what to do. So always take baby steps, and apply agile processes slowly. Make a proper plan by first understanding the mentality of your people, making them release the importance and benefits of agility.

A Scrum master for me is the backbone of the Scrum process, he understands and masters the scrum principles, but much more is required for agile transformation.

Normally, a scrum master is the Guru of Scrum but for adopting agile we need him to coach the teams. He needs to coach the teams on self-organizing, self-accountability, agile mindset, store point estimation, and so on.

Teams where the scrum master just expects everyone to adopt scrum themselves without coaching their team member are much more likely to fail.

Adopting the mindset of agile is at the heart of making agile work in your organization. Coaching teams on the right practices of agile and slowly adopting them are key to making agile work in any organization.