How many concurrent projects following an agile delivery approach can your company sustain?

 

Organizations that are in the midst of an agile transformation will often track how many projects within their portfolios are being delivered following an agile lifecycle. Obsessing over this number or using it as a basis of comparison, or worse, competition between departments will make it a vanity metric. However, used appropriately, it can be a useful data point for assessing the progress of the transformation.

Knowing how many concurrent projects can be delivered using agile approaches is important because if the organization attempts to execute more than its capacity to deliver, a slew of issues will emerge.

Mandating that core team members will be dedicated to a project or product is important so that many of the beneficial outcomes of agile approaches such as predictable velocity, reduced context switching and increased team cohesion can be achieved. Dedicated product ownership is also needed to ensure that stakeholders needs and wants are being actively solicited and the team is not delayed waiting on decisions or requirement clarification.

But is that enough?

Having sufficient agile leads (e.g. Scrum Masters, XP Coaches) and coaches is also critical to meet increased delivery expectations from business sponsors.

Agile leads need to be focused on a single project. Within that project, they can be supporting more than one team, but to have them juggle different projects will impede their ability to remove blockers, increase alignment and build high-performing teams.

Coaching is needed at the delivery team level but it is equally important to have key stakeholders such as functional managers coached to achieve the necessary mindset and behaviors shifts required for successful adoption. Without this, teams are likely to stall in their agile evolution.

Procuring and retaining competent agile leads and coaches is not easy. They are in high demand due to accelerating demand for agile delivery and finding qualified candidates who have both the experience and cultural fit with your organization is challenging. Like any other hot skill, there will be a limited supply of full-time talent in a geographic area given the number of companies simultaneously conducting agile transformations.

You should certainly have plans being executed to build these skills internally, but this won't happen overnight and if your company has compensation or cultural shortfalls relative to others in the local market, it will be very difficult to build sustained bench strength. You could use contingent staffing to address peaks in demand this is not a long-term, financially viable strategy if increasing organizational agility is truly a strategic objective and not just the "fad du jour". 

But not tackling this will just prove Peter Drucker right "In most organizations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle."