Learning to Sprint

We Asked the Project Management Community: What Was Your Greatest Challenge When Adapting to Agile Approaches?

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We asked the project management community:

What was your greatest challenge when adapting to agile approaches?

TRANSITION TIME

What other challenges did you encounter when adopting agile approaches, and how did you ensure a smooth transition? Share your tips on the PMI Project, Program and Portfolio Management LinkedIn Group.

MINIMUM WAY

“I had to learn to let go of the idea that the product has to be 100 percent complete when it's delivered. It's been a huge adjustment delivering over multiple iterations with modifications and enhancements along the way. One of the first things I needed to do was better understand the shift as a whole and the rationale behind it. Being able to see the behind-the-scenes work leading up to delivery and knowing the business has been engaged throughout really helps bring everything together.”

—Lisa Gannon, PMP, senior learning project manager, Anthem, Youngstown, Ohio, USA

ALL ABOARD AGILE

“Building buy-in and awareness is difficult for an agile transition. Our organization uses a combination of practices to ensure a successful transformation. We have used book clubs to discuss works by agile thought leaders to help the team understand agile principles and the philosophy behind them. We formed an agile community of practice to discuss and debate views on different agile topics, which helps us to bring consistency of implementation across different teams. We also conduct workshops, starting with senior executives. This helps us to ensure that everyone is clear about the reason for implementing agile and tailor agile to organizational needs.”

—Rahul Sudame, PMI-ACP, PMP, delivery partner, Persistent Systems, Pune, India

FAILURE IS AN OPTION

“One of the most challenging things I've seen for agile transitions is the idea of letting your team fail. Early on, failures are going to be common as teams develop expectations, align estimates and establish cadences. Not every planned story will be completed at the end of the sprint. As a project manager, it becomes your job not to prevent failure, but to defend those failures and demonstrate how they'll lead to more frequent success in future iterations.”

—Jason Jafarian, lead application developer, IBM, Washington, D.C., USA

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

“The mindset shift is the biggest challenge. Most people have the misconception that agile adoption is all about having the development team adopt processes and practices, but it's a lot more than that. It's about understanding how open an organizational culture might be in addressing low-level issues and getting them resolved so that better products are delivered, happy customers are earned and teams feel proud of their achievements.”

—Bibin Soman, PMI-ACP, development manager, agile coach, RM Education Solutions India, Thiruvananthapuram, India

COMMUNITY GATHERINGS

“Talking to other agilists in a local agile community is the best way to learn fast. I like the way my local PMI chapter has set up its local project management communities—finding a good agile local community was key to my learning curve. At local group meetings, I would ask lots of questions and learn from scrum masters, agile coaches and performers in various agile approaches. Plus, there is usually free pizza.”

—Greg Mester, PMI-ACP, PMP, project manager, scrum master, agile coach, The Judge Group, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

“Getting the project team to adopt a new set of practices is a major challenge. This requires a change of mindset, which is not easy. To prepare team members for this change, we delivered small doses of ‘Do's and Don'ts’ frequently for the first couple of weeks of the project. We also kept discussing the differences between old and new practices and the benefits of the latter. This reinforced the idea of using agile practices consistently.”

—Vasudeva Sharma Mallavajhala, PMP, associate director, quality assurance and regulatory compliance, Novartis Healthcare, Hyderabad, India

NONSTOP KNOWLEDGE

“The biggest challenge for me was the reality that there's no end to the agile learning curve. To get up to speed, I read articles, attended conferences and learned about scrum and Kanban. But every time I reached the excitement of ‘Yes, I got it,’ I realized there was more to learn. Two years after I started practicing agile, I began volunteering to lecture on the topic—teaching is the best way to learn. I've learned to be okay with not knowing everything about agile while still embracing the learning process.”

—Michal Raczka, PMI-ACP, PMP, head of IT strategy and project management, mBank S.A., Warsaw, Poland

The Right Approach

Nearly 3 in 4 organizations use agile approaches at least some of the time. Here's how frequently all organizations use agile approaches:

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Note: Numbers don't add up to 100 percent because of rounding.

Top barriers organizations cite for adopting and scaling agile:

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53% Organizational culture at odds with agile values

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46% General organizational resistance to change

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42% Inadequate management support and sponsorship

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41% Lack of skills/experience with agile approaches

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35% Insufficient training and education

Source: Pulse of the Profession®, PMI, 2018; 12th Annual State of Agile Report, VersionOne, 2018

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