Overcoming the Barriers to Agile Expansion

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  

Agile as a concept has nothing left to prove. Clearly it has been embraced as a way to deliver projects in software development environments where there is often a high degree of complexity and a lot of unknowns at the start of a project--a situation tailor made for agile. It has demonstrated an ability to consistently deliver success in a number of different areas, from customer satisfaction to time to market and project costs. It’s not surprising then that agile is expanding beyond the traditional focus of software development and into a number of other business areas.

That expansion is often ultimately successful, but for many organizations the successes are less dramatic than the initial implementation. Further, expanding agile into areas of the business where traditional, waterfall-based project execution is common can be less successful than areas where it is less common. In this article, I want to look at why these problems can occur and consider some ways that agile expansion can be more successful.

Agile implementation vs. agile expansion
When organizations make a commitment to embrace agile, they generally recognize that it represents a significant shift for the project execution functions of the organization. As a result, they invest in formal training and support for agile--training and certification programs on their agile methodology of choice, …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.