Leda WuSr. Manager of Enterprise PMO| Empyrean Benefit SolutionsLeague City, Tx, United States
Hello all, I am curious about the success rate of Agile framework. Our company's development team has adopted Agile process for 8 years, yet the team is still struggling to complete the items in each sprint. The completion rate is less than 50%. Hence the rate of hit the target development completion date is very low. Can someone in this community share some information at your company? What is the success rate? How do you conduct the Agile process? Appreciate any advice/input.
On the other hand, we have project team who is doing Waterfall and delivered the project successfully (on time, meeting the requirement, get a very good ROI). Saving Changes...
Great question, fact based.
Interesting answers, since agile is supported by top management, suppose root cause could be on the dev team(s). Aaron P questions are important to reflect on, i.e. team procedure, regarding Scrum methodology applicability e.g. sprint goal, stories, retrospective. Saving Changes...
Retrospectives need to drill down into why the sprint plan missed it's target. From my own experiences:
- Perhaps the task sizes & scopes need to revaluated.
- scope to automate any of those tasks?
- it doesn't sound like the teams are learning from past issues
- try process mapping: where do delays happen? Apply the 5Whys.
- are the scrum members actually working together? I had this issue last year and it turned out team leads were overruling tasks and getting their reports to do other work. But those scrum members didn't want to mention that to the scrum master.
- how transparent is the work? How often are teams side-tracked because something important cropped up? We learned to set aside about 15% capacity in sprints to accommodate any critical bugs, and still maintain focus on the sprint targets.
Leda, my experience has shown me that to have a successful project first, the team and the stakeholders should enable to make the right decisions. The decision-making process needs valuable and timely information to create an adequate decision framework to take actions that will solve the problems for achieving the objectives settled.
Timely and valuable information is just accessed when the job´s environment is supported by a building of trust and transparency. Indeed, people will be willing to share knowledge, issues, risk and accurate information which will help design an adequate project strategy.
First, for achieving this is mandatory to evaluate the mindset of the stakeholders and team involved. Agile is focused on people and their interaction, and the reason for this is because is just when people will enable to make the right decision even at the last responsible moment, they will deliver business value for the enterprise and the customers. Without this, the project strategy plan is inefficient, planning and budget are not designed for the right context, and as consequence, the decisions taken never will solve the problems. Indeed, it is the typical case of a failed project because any of the goals are fulfilled.
First, I implemented a stakeholder – team diagram, including the external and internal (could be a RASI matrix), which help understand how the information should flow and decision are taken.
In the case of planning for example, who are involved in the planning? at what level are we? why, was the planning created suitable to the project context? Is a flexible tool easy to adapt to the frequent changes during the life cycle of the project?.
The lessons learned and the actions to improve based on the retrospective (which should be as frequently as possible, especially if the team is new and based on the complexity of the project) are crucial. However, in my experience just if the team and stakeholders understand the real cause of the failure and are committed to solving the problems as an integrated team, the issues will be solved (and risk will be mitigated). Otherwise, the actions (again wrong decisions) will drive to repeat the mistakes constantly. Saving Changes...
