Jan 31, 2022
Where is Agile Headed?
A review of Digital.ai’s 15th Annual State of Agile Report
For many older, experienced project management types like myself, Agile is a great and powerful beast, with many fine features to offer software development projects, but also can seem like a runaway train barreling toward more established project management techniques that have been focused for years on improving project management practices to address abysmal project failure rates.
The question continues to be: is all this Agile excitement going to end up destroying the concept of disciplined project management altogether? In essence, the question is one of where is Agile headed?
Digital.ai’s 15th Annual State Of Agile Report — based on a survey of “…Agile practitioners of all levels, from more than 100 countries….” (according to Digital.ai, the survey the report was based on a survey that was conducted between February and April 2021 with “…individuals across a broad range of industries invited to participate”; “…4,182 responses were received with 1,382 complete survey responses collected, analyzed, and prepared into a summary report by Regina Corso Consulting, an independent survey consultancy.”) — provides some interesting commentary on Agile’s trajectory.
Significant Increases in Agile Adoption
Although the results of the Digital.ai survey are a bit hard to decipher with significant precision, it is clear that Agile adoption has increased significantly in just the last year. Digital.ai’s report “…indicate(s) significant growth in Agile adoption within software development teams, increasing from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.” Apparently, the actual survey allowed multiple responses to the question “Which areas of your organization have adopted Agile principles and practices?”; so these numbers are a bit murky, but definitely portray a significant year over year increase.
A couple of other statistics coming out of the Digital.ai report further emphasize a startling increase in Agile adoption:
- 94% of respondents “report their company is practicing Agile.”
- “over half of respondents (52%) say either a majority or all of their company’s teams have adopted Agile.”
Although it is important to keep these statistics in context — since this was an online survey and did not use a more rigorous, statistically valid sample, it is unlikely that most companies who were invited to participate but had not adopted Agile even responded — the results still tend to make my head spin a bit. Even three years ago, it would have been hard to predict this accelerated level of Agile adoption.
Agile Adoption Benefits
With Agile adoption increasing so substantially, what have been some of the positive outcomes for companies?
According to Digitial.ai’s survey, as shown in Figure 1, above, most of the positive impacts of Agile for companies have been related to better management of shifting priorities and “Business/IT alignment.” Project “Delivery speed/time to market” was also reported as a significant benefit of Agile adoption by 64% of survey respondents.
Unfortunately, “Software quality” and “Software maintainability” were only rated as a key benefit of adopting Agile by 45% of respondents and 35% of respondents, respectively. This makes me wonder what the longer term cost / benefit of adopting Agile will look like for most companies. Perhaps, we’ll have to wait for a more in-depth study on that, but it’s worth noting that “Cost reduction” was listed as the lowest item on the benefits of adopting Agile list, coming in at 23%.
Agile Challenges Aren’t Unexpected
So what did Digital.ai’s survey find out about the challenges of adopting Agile?
An shown in Figure 2, above, the Digital.ai report notes that “organizations face a variety of challenges as they introduce agile techniques, practices, and tools,” and:
In fact, 30% of respondents identified no fewer than ten different challenges faced while adopting Agile.
It is interesting that among the many challenges noted in the survey results most have to do with process inconsistency and maturity — “Inconsistencies in processes and practices” (46%); “Lack of skills and experience” (42%) — or stakeholder and organizational change management challenges — “Cultural clashes (43%); “General organizational resistance to change (42%); “Absence of leadership participation” (41%); “Inadequate management support and sponsorship” (40%). Many traditional project management methods would likely list several of these same challenges.
Two things missing from the list of Agile adoption challenges that would almost certainly come up near the top of the list of more traditionally managed software projects are problems with scope management and requirements management. These tend to be persistent challenges on non-Agile software projects. My experience has been that these challenges are definitely much less of an issue on Agile oriented projects.
It is important to note that scope and requirements challenges were apparently not listed as potential challenges on the Digital.ai survey instrument. So is this a challenge that is embedded in the 5% “Other” challenges category, or does it just not come up at all for the vast majority of companies practicing Agile software development? In the latter case, it should surely be listed as a benefit of Agile adoption.
Where Does Agile Go From Here?
So what does Digital.ai’s 15th Annual State Of Agile Report tell us about where Agile is headed? For one thing it tells us that Agile is here to stay. Companies are seeing enough benefits from Agile on their software development projects, and these benefits seem to outweigh the costs of the most likely challenges, including lower software quality and potentially higher software development costs.
The real question remains: can Agile and more disciplined, traditional project management methods co-exist within companies? And a related question is how do companies select the right project management methods (Agile or Traditional) for a given project? In essence this is the same inquiry about Hybrid Project Management that many of us have been exploring for a few years now. There is good news here: there are proven methods for addressing this question (see the BlueProject Post on RUP).
So what else is there to say about this topic, at the moment? I suppose only: more to follow.
