Over the last 7 years of being involved in Agile adoptions in South Africa, primarily, at large financial services organisations, I have observed trends that have made the adoption of Agile particularly challenging. These are as follows: - Lack of business engagement – most Agile adoptions are driven by IT and ignore business - Program execution – coordination of large programmes - Team delivery – delivery teams are provided with the necessary constraints, conditions and purpose - Lack of systems thinking – extending agility to all the supporting functions in the organisation - Lack of Change management – typically mandated from executives to deliver the promise of Agile, however, leaders underestimate the impact on people The talk at Regional Scrum Gathering India 2017 was aimed at individuals and organisations that are currently on or starting an Agile adoption by discussing each of these challenges identified and validated through the research as well as providing some options in addressing these challenges.

1. REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERING
INDIA 2017
BANGALORE | SEPTEMBER 6-7
Are we Agile
or Fragile?
Reflections from the IQbusiness
Agile Index Report 2017

2. BIASE
DE GREGORIO
EXECUTIVE PARTNER –
LEAD agility@IQbusiness
IQbusiness – South Africa
bdegregorio@iqbusiness.net
@biased77

3. #RSGI2017
WHY AGILE INDEX?

4. 4
WHY?
Business Engagement
1
Program Execution2
Team Delivery3
Change Management5
Local optimisation4

5. #RSGI2017
HOW?

6. 6
20% Scrum Masters
14% Coaches / Consultants
4% Product Owners
HOW?
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS –
ONLINE SURVEY
#RSGI2017
66% Information Technology
50% Financial Services
49% 5000 employees +
66% Leadership role

7. 7
INDUSTRY LEADERS
Peter Alkema - CIO FNB Business Bank
Norman Blunden - Head of Agile Portfolio
Office Standard Bank Corporate and Investment
Banking
Christiaan du Preez - Head of Global
Markets (IT) Standard Bank Corporate and
Investment Banking
James Knupfer - Absa CTO - Director of
Agile Transformation and Coaching
Josef Langerman - DevOps and Agile
Evangelist Standard Bank - Group Head
Software Engineering
HOW?
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS –
INTERVIEWS
#RSGI2017
AGILE EXPERTS
Antoinette Coetzee - Owner and Founder of
JustPlainAgile
Ellen Gottesdiener - EBG Consulting, Inc.
President and Agile Product Management / PO
Coach
Sam Laing & Karen Greaves - Owners of
Growing Agile

8. #RSGI2017
KEY OBSERVATIONS

9. 9
CROSSING THE
CHASM
#RSGI2017
Larger companies
17% 5 Years +
Mid-sized companies
18% 5 Years +
Smaller companies
33% 5 Years +
Practitioners
50% 5 Years +

10. 10
OR RATHER
CROSSED THE
CHASM
#RSGI2017
“While Agile adoption within IT
appears to have “crossed the
chasm”, enterprise agility is
lagging”

11. LACK OF FOCUS
ON TECHNICAL
PRACTICES
11#RSGI2017
56% Scrum / Scrumban
0.4% XP/FDD
>59% Process driven practices,
tools and techniques
<36% Engineering-driven practices,
tools and techniques
6% Adopted to improve
engineering discipline

12. 12
LACK OF FOCUS
ON TECHNICAL
PRACTICES
Tips:
• Engineering practices and improvement
should be on same backlog as features
• Slack time to improve skills
• SM & Coaches gain knowledge and
experience in engineering practices
#RSGI2017
“Engineering practices
are used by less than 36% of the
respondents. By neglecting these
practices, teams will struggle to
improve their velocity and
quality of software delivery,
impacting their ability to be
Agile.”

13. 13
ARE WE REALLY
FASTER?
13#RSGI2017
72% Adopt to accelerate
product delivery
58% Adopt for the ability to adapt
to change
93% Realise improvement in
ability to change vs
79% Realise improvement
in faster time to market

14. 14
ARE WE REALLY
FASTER?
“I don’t think Agile as a
methodology is a silver bullet
that will make things go faster, but if
you just think about making the most
valuable decisions based on the
most value to our clients, with that,
you’ll go faster.”
Tips:
• Hard conversations to set expectations
• Invest in automation
• Leaders to remove organisational
blockers
• Focus on optimising the value chain – the
system
14#RSGI2017

15. 15
IS IT CHEAPER?
15#RSGI2017
8% Adopt to reduce costs
7% Adopt for improved
predictability
82% Realise improvement quality
86% Realise improved
predictability

16. 16
IS IT CHEAPER?
Tips:
• Optimise flow of work
• Remove waste
• Backlog refinement to prioritise high-value
items
• Portfolio prioritisation and limit WIP to
focus on high-value initiatives
16#RSGI2017
“Cost was the hopeful, call it
by-product, of doing things
differently. So, we never went in to
say, I want to save so much, but we
knew we would get a cost-saving if we
do it. So, we wanted to do the right
thing and then cost will follow.”

17. #RSGI2017
SUCCESSES AND
CHALLENGES
IN ADOPTION

18. 18
SUCCESSFUL
ADOPTIONS?
18#RSGI2017
Teams
62% somewhat successful
34% completely successful
4% not at all successful
Organisations
67% somewhat successful
12% completely successful
21% not at all successful

19. Antoinette Coetzee – Founder and Owner
JustPlainAgile

20. 20
LACK OF BUY-IN?
43% Top management
35% Combination
8% Bottom-up
13% Don’t Know
20#RSGI2017

21. 21
Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office
Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

22. 22
LACK OF BUY-IN?
Tips:
• Lean / Change approach
• Experiments and feedback-driven
change
• Participatory and collaborative
change management
• Understand WIIFM
22#RSGI2017
“It’s not only the top Exec
leadership that needs to buy into
these ideas. It’s also the layers
below them… that may require
radical restructuring in
organisations...finding the right
place to house the people in the
middle layers is quite a
challenging problem.”

23. 23
CHANGE
MANAGEMENT
(RESILIENCE)
13% completely adequate
change activities
57% somewhat adequate
change activities
30% not at all adequate
change activities
23#RSGI2017

24. 24
CHANGE
MANAGEMENT
(RESILIENCE)
Tips:
• Remind your stakeholders that this is a
journey
• Reflect on the victories no matter how
small
• Change events (HSM) – ELSA Model
24#RSGI2017
“It's not the sort of change that’s going to happen
overnight – for every three steps forward it’s two
steps back… but looming deadlines and high
expectations will leave you overwhelmed and
despondent; it’s not healthy.”
“Perhaps hardest of all is how difficult it can be to
see the progress that’s been made from the
inside.“
“When you look back…you’ll see that you’ve
played an important role in the future of your
organisation… how do you keep going when it
gets really tough?”

25. 25
ROLE OF PRODUCT
OWNER AND
SCRUM MASTER
25
41% Hardest role to fill is a Product
Owner
32% Hardest role to fill between
Scrum Master (19%) and Agile
Coach (13%)
3X More certified Scrum Masters
than Product Owners (SA)
10X More certified Scrum Masters
than Product Owners (India)

26. 26
Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office
Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking

27. 27
ROLE OF PRODUCT
OWNER AND
SCRUM MASTER
Tips:
• Take time in identifying the right people
• Allow coaching to these roles
• Provide slack to learn
• Understand the roles and responsibilities
27#RSGI2017
“…there can be challenges to fulfil
the product ownership role if the
business doesn’t buy in or
believe (in the value of the role)…
and the other challenge is that their
current role prevents them from
taking full ownership of the
(Product Owner) role…”

28. 28
MIDDLE
MANAGEMENT
CAREER PATH
“Current management levels might
provide resistance, and it’s important to
clarify the roles of traditional
management and the specialist
technology roles.”
“…new ways of working and a
technical career path really needs to
walk next to each other, otherwise we will
have resistance… because there’s
uncertainty…”
Tips:
• Work with HR to define career paths for
technologists
• Work with HR to define performance
management in ‘New Ways of Working’
28#RSGI2017

29. 29
ONE SIZE DOES
NOT FIT ALL
Tips:
• Learn from Lean / Agile principles and
use this as departure point
• Align on principles and then select
appropriate practices
• Apply SHU-HA-RI and only tailor when
you understand the trade-offs
29#RSGI2017
“…look at a problem holistically and
use whatever we have in our tool
boxes, whether it comes from SAFe or
whether it comes from something else.
We should be able to apply our Lean
and Agile thinking to the problem
that’s in front of us and work with the
mindset… the problem lies in the
mindset, the problem does not lie in
the tool that gets chosen.”

30. #RSGI2017
WHAT DOES THE
FUTURE
OF AGILE LOOK LIKE?

31. MOVING FROM IT TO CULTURE
31
“…people are going to start saying, let’s do some work upstream, let’s sort out
requirements and business cases and design and project prioritisation,
and then DevOps… going to be downstream innovations, and then your users
and your customers will start to see processes around them start to be innovative.”
31#RSGI2017

32. 32
Peter Hundermark – Agile coach
Agile42

33. BUSINESS AGILITY
33
“…from a business perspective (we’re) displaying some great agility. And if we
look at some of the ways that we are pushing some of the agendas… (there’s)
evidence of agility at play, but maybe not in the way we would look for it, or in the
way we try and label it.”
33#RSGI2017

34. 34
SO ARE WE AGILE OR FRAGILE?
Same maturity
Same challenges
Same experiences
Smaller market
Moving towards business agility
34#RSGI2017

35. #RSGI2017
Name : Biase De Gregorio
Phone : +27 11 259 4430
Mobile : +27 82 411 1976
Twitter : @biased77
Email : bdegregorio@iqbusiness.net
THANK YOU