Agile Trends Switzerland 2012

What are the main hurdles to introduce agile approaches in Swiss companies. 

• Introducing agile company-wide is a cultural change process. Such a change takes time and sometimes hurts,
• Without commitment of senior management, the initiative will fail,

• Doubt that lean or agile works, doubt you can find agile experts, doubt that your projects can be realised with agile approaches,
• At the end what matters is collaborator purpose, customer satisfaction,  business value.

SwissQ has published a "SwissQ Agile Trends & Benchmarks Switzerland 2012". The study can be downloaded as PDF from their web site.

Below some of the findings of the study.

Major Hurdles When Introducing Agile Approaches

• 95%: Capabilities to handle organizational changes and the culture 
• 39%: Overall resistance against changes
• 37%: Availability of skilled collaborators in the area of agile approaches
• 34%: Projects are too big or too complex
• 31%: Resistance for the internal or external customer
• 28%: Missing support of senior management
• 25%: Doubts that agile approaches do scale
• 23%: No resources or time for sustainable changes
•   9%: Costs reasons

We wrote in blogs that introducing Scrum in the development department or in the whole company is a change process. The coaches should be trained in change management and have experiences with resistance to changes.

The above points in italics are all related to change processes.You can handle two thirds of the hurdles with adequate change management training and a clear change project definition. Do not try to introduce Scrum at company level without such an approach. 

Main Reasons Why Agile Projects are Cancelled

• 52%: Missing experience with agile approaches
• 45%: Company culture clash with agile principles
• 41%: External pressure to use traditional approaches (Agile 51%, Waterfall 40%, Iterative 22%, RUP 16%, and HERMES 12%)
  The used agile approaches are: 
• Scrum 84.5%, 
• Kanban 16.9%, 
• Own Approach 15.5%, 
• XP 14.1%, 
• Agile Unified Process 11.3%, 
• Others 9.9%, 
• SCRUMBAN 8.5%, 
• Feature Driven Development FDD 0%
• 38%: Missing support from senior management
• 37%: Missing or insufficient training and coaching
• 35%: Missing communication between departments
• 23%: Team does not want to learn new approach

We wrote in previous blogs that the Scrum Master is of tremendous importance. You need a skilled and enthusiastic Scrum Master; avoid Scrum Administrator. The new version of the Scrum guide clearly stated   who is responsible for the introduction of the Scrum approach in the company? Often people state that the management should spread Scrum in the company. Ken and Jeff have a clear idea who is in charge of this.

The Scrum Master serves the organization in several ways, including:

• Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;
• Planning Scrum implementations within the organization;
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development;
• Causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team; and,
• Working with other Scrum Masters to increase the effectiveness of the application of Scrum in the organization.

So the Scrum Master is a main driver for the introduction of Scrum in all departments and levels in the company. He needs indeed senior management support but the Scrum Master daily job is to spread Scrum in the company.