What’s Stopping the Shift From ‘Doing Agile’ to ‘Being Agile’?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

In the last few years, you haven’t been able to move without tripping over an organization committed to an agile transformation. Whether it’s a desire to improve enterprise agility across the organization, or simply to streamline aspects of planning and delivery, agile at scale and across strategic elements of business operations has been a big thing.

Yet if you ask Google, you will find that multiple studies suggest that these transformations aren’t really making a difference. The numbers vary considerably, but the studies are consistent. And we’re not talking about niche analyses either (Accenture, CIO.com, and Boston Consulting Group, among many others) all say the same thing.

What’s going on? Are agile transformations the wrong approach, or is there something else happening?

While there are many reasons, in my experience there is a common theme.

‘Doing’ agile is not ‘being’ agile
Many organizations have adopted agile practices, but not many have been able to go beyond that. They may have processes and approaches that are built on agile concepts, but they haven’t fully embraced what it means to be agile.

Or put another way, they are doing agile, they aren’t being agile. To understand what I mean, let’s think back to the early days of agile approaches, at least in the modern era.

When …

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