Reviewing the latest State of Agile report from Collabnet/Versionone and the 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report from scrum.org/Berlin Product People GmbH, what trajectory does the adoption of agile and Scrum project delivery methods have in industry these days?
These two reports, from well-established organisations, provide some useful insights alongside quite a bit of data gathered from respondents across the industry. Reading these, there are some interesting themes worth highlighting for consideration by agile advocates and/or those considering a career as agile practitioners:
Companies’ levels of maturity in adopting agile techniques continues to grow and offer opportunities. 78% of respondents’ companies are in the process of adopting agile methodologies (‘early stage’ or ‘growing’) which indicates I think a few things;
- Moving established waterfall organisations to widely use agile working is not easy and takes some time. Only 11% consider their implementations ‘mature’. The cultural changes required by organisations to embrace agile methods remain a barrier to adoption e.g. misalignment with agile principles, lack of senior buy-in and resistance to change.
- The tendency may be to push the agile agenda into a workplace that requires a change in culture where it is easier to reach a hybrid/compromise scenario and run out of steam before a truly transforming the organisations’ working practices. There is nothing wrong with this by the way, Scrum for instance is a framework you tailor to your needs. What this implies is that there is still plenty of work for Scrum and other agile professionals to do helping companies integrate new ways of working and gain the benefits that Agile working methods bring.
- Only 4% of respondents say that their organisations’ rollouts have stalled, which is encouragingly low and perhaps also reflects a tendency to settle at a hybrid approach or patchy implementation rather than stop the work entirely – I suggest this reflects favourably on the early delivery of business value that agile approaches provide.
Scaling frameworks – there are now a few clear front-runner methodologies for scaling Scrum and I believe this area is one that is key to accelerating successful adoption of agile techniques in industry as they are adopted by larger companies. The take-away for Scrum Masters and others looking to forge a career in the industry is to look-ahead and ensure you have a good level of knowledge of, and training in, one or more of these frameworks. Otherwise you may find a lack of knowledge a barrier to job mobility! Roughly half of respondents use a scaling framework:
The take-away for Scrum Masters and others looking to forge a career in the industry is to look-ahead and ensure you have a good level of knowledge of, and training in, one or more of these frameworks. Otherwise you may find a lack of knowledge a barrier to job mobility!
Aligning with DevOps models is key to integrating agile in larger enterprises that are more used to traditional waterfall/hand-off models of change delivery. If agile methodology is restricted to the development teams, without integrating the operational support functions that will run the systems once delivered, your company is missing a trick. For the Operational functions to efficiently support the development cycle, they need to be integrated into the process and not simply a hand-off point after Go-Live. This requires a lot of effort to embrace continuous delivery/improvement and automation, which is a big ask of a function that is understandably focused on keeping the lights on reliably.
Value Stream Management (VSM) is being increasingly used to align development and operations with business value, with 67% of respondents to the State of Agile report stating this was Important or Very Important = another area for aspiring agile advocates to investigate.
Scrum Master / agile advocacy is a great choice for females, which is great news for increasing the quality of decision making in the industry! The proportion of females engaging in agile careers is significantly higher than usual in the I.T. industry and females’ salaries are now trending higher than males in the upper pay bands 😊
