Are we Agile or Fragile? Agile Africa 2017 - Reflections from the IQbusiness Agile Index Report 2017

Copyright © 2017 IQbusiness
Are we Agile
or Fragile?
Reflections from the IQbusiness
Agile Index Report 2017
Presented by Biase De Gregorio, Head of agility@IQbusiness
@biased77

Copyright © 2017 IQbusinessCopyright © 2017 IQbusiness 2
WHY AGILE INDEX?

Copyright © 2017 IQbusiness 3
WHY?
Business Engagement
1
Program Execution2
Team Delivery3
Change Management5
Local optimisation4

HOW?

49% 5000 employees or more
20% Scrum Masters
14% Coaches / Consultants
4% Product Owners
276 Respondents
85% Gauteng
66% Information Technology
50% Financial Services
HOW?
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS –
ONLINE SURVEY

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
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
HOW?
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS –
INTERVIEWS

AHA MOMENTS?

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

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

LACK OF FOCUS
ON TECHNICAL
PRACTICES
10
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

LACK OF FOCUS
ON TECHNICAL
PRACTICES
“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.”
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

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
ARE WE REALLY
FASTER?

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

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

IS IT CHEAPER?
“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.”
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

SUCCESSES AND
CHALLENGES
IN ADOPTION

SUCCESSFUL
ADOPTIONS?
Teams
62% somewhat successful
34% completely successful
Organisations
67% somewhat successful
12% completely successful

Antoinette Coetzee – Founder and Owner
JustPlainAgile

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

Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office

“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.”
LACK OF BUY-IN?
Tips:
• Lean / Change approach
• Experiments and feedback-driven
change
• Participatory and collaborative
change management
• Understand WIIFM

CHANGE
MANAGEMENT
(RESILIENCE)
13% completely adequate
57% somewhat adequate
30% not at all adequate

CHANGE
MANAGEMENT
(RESILIENCE)
“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?”
Tips:
• Remind your
stakeholders that
this is a journey
• Reflect on the
victories no matter
how small
• Change events
(HSM)

ROLE OF PRODUCT
OWNER AND
SCRUM MASTER
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

Norman Blunden – Head of Agile Portfolio Office

ROLE OF PRODUCT
OWNER AND
SCRUM MASTER
“…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…”
Tips:
• Take time in identifying the right
people
• Allow coaching to these roles
• Provide slack to learn
• Understand the roles and
responsibilitiesCopyright © 2017 IQbusiness

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’

ONE SIZE DOES
NOT FIT ALL
“…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.”
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

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE
OF AGILE LOOK LIKE?

MOVING FROM IT TO CULTURE
30
“…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.”

Peter Hundermark – Agile coach
Agile42

BUSINESS AGILITY
32
“…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.”

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

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

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Are we Agile or Fragile? Agile Africa 2017 - Reflections from the IQbusiness Agile Index Report 2017