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When Not To Use Agile

Over the years, Agile methodologies have taken the heat when they appear to have failed to deliver expected benefits to an organization.

If our project fails, the tendency is that “we must blame the Agile process and our practices in some way for this”.

Agile is not a magic stick to save a failing project and bring immediate results. It lets you uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

As with all development methods, the skill and experience of users determine the degree of success and/or abuse of such activity.

So sometimes we obtain the agility by making up our own variation of this methodology. In this case, failure of this project should largely be incumbent upon us for deciding to sacrifice the practices we chose to ignore and the new ones we added.  Some are Agile while just for namesake, and following no methodology, just cherry-picking a couple of practices here and there, and picking the principles they like.

1.  Checkbook commitment doesn’t support organizational change management. CEOs create within the company their own personal family dysfunction.

2.    Culture doesn’t support change.

3.    There are no or ineffective retrospectives. Actions which come out get ignored or written off.

4.    In a race to finish features, the infrastructure gets worse and architecture becomes unstable. Distributed teams make this worse.

5.    Lack of collaboration in planning. Like having the whole team for release planning.

6.    None or too many Product Owners. Both cases look the same. Agile is yet another hat to wear and the person is already too busy. They check out and ask the team to just do Agile. Can’t get past the ‘this sucks’ phase of adoption if the business is not bought in.

7.    Bad Scrum Master which uses a command and control style with the team to look faster, yet in reality slows things down. Low morale actually makes people less productive

8.    No on-site evangelist. If the teams are distributed, need one at every site. Can’t reap the benefits of Agile or offshore without an on-site coach at each location.

9.    No solid team.

10. Tsunami of technical debt if don’t pull tests forward.

11. Traditional performance appraisals. Individual heroics rewarded

12. Revert to traditional. Change is hard.

World of Agile is a brand owned by Effective PMC Pvt Ltd. Founded in 2009 and specializes in providing professional training services on Project Management related certifications. In the last 7 years, trained more than 10K+ professionals from various verticals on certifications by Project Management Institute (PMI)® Such as Project Management Professional (PMP)®, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® other certifications like SCRUM, PRINCE2, ITIL, MICROSOFT PROJECT and many students have passed PMP® examination after attending our courses.

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