Is Agile Really Going Mainstream?

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   Benefits Realization   Decision Making   Strategy  

If you’ve been involved in agile for any length of time, then you’re probably familiar with the annual State of Agile Report. The 15^th edition is now available here. As always, it contains some interesting findings and if I wanted to, I could write numerous articles based on just that report. But this time I want to focus on a theme that I saw in reading the report that suggest to me that agile is finally going mainstream.

I say finally, because, despite all the claims of mainstream agile that we have all been hearing for the last decade or more, I’ve always found that agile is still largely confined to a few areas of the business and a few more strategic practices. It’s not the dominant approach to getting work done in most organizations. But things are changing, and in large part it seems to have been the pandemic that has been the catalyst for that change.

One of the highlights of this year’s State of Agile report was that 86% of respondents said that agile principles and practices had been adopted in software development within their organization. Perhaps not surprising but consider that in the 2020 version of the report the number was only 37%. Well, we’ve always known that agile does well in software development. But consider these numbers, buried below that headline. Agile was used by 29% of organizations in Operations, by 17% in Marketing, 16% in HR, 11% in Sales …

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