Overusing Agile Can Reduce Your Success
Overusing agile will decrease your organization’s success! Here are signs of agile overuse:
Agile is the default: Using agile on projects without short-term needs puts unneeded pressure on scarce agile resources. Project solutions needing in-depth, long-term thinking often won’t benefit from agile, because agile doesn’t provide time to think through long-term consequences. If a project doesn’t have true short-term delivery needs, use traditional project management. Apply your agile teams to time-critical projects.
Designs focus on today without considering the future: If your sprints are consumed by fixing functions from hasty, ill-conceived designs, your speed will only get worse if you continue with agile. Lack of long-term analysis and design produces awkward tools or processes that require frequent band-aids. More agile then means more fixes and more fragile solutions.
Prioritization loses integrity: Over-reliance on agile to produce fast results reduces clarity needed to properly prioritize work. When everything is #1 priority, relentless pressure to produce decreases staff effectiveness. The urgency that used to differentiate crucial and nice-to-have is lost. Project timelines lose meaning because deadlines aren’t seen as authentic or justified.
Leaders are impatient to deliver: Another sign of inappropriate use of agile is a rush to deliver, which might introduce sub-par testing and implementing solutions without appropriate training. Leaders, who are focused on speed of change rather than improved outcomes, produce chaos and lose credibility with their teams and customers. Improvements envisioned at project initiation are often abandoned, because team members spend their time correcting issues created by earlier solution implementations.
Agile discipline breaks down: Instead of short, daily stand-up meetings, consistent sprint length and dedicated team members, you see the cadence of delivering functions sputter and confidence in agile wane. In some organizations, the agile terminology remains but doesn’t match what happens. “Stand-ups,” which are supposed to short, daily meetings focused on status, become weekly, long meetings of solving problems in addition to sharing status. The end of a sprint is determined by the next time any work is completed, rather than by the set cadence for progressing the initiative. Retrospectives become complaint sessions and don’t produce meaningful changes to improve results.
Agile can generate outstanding results when properly applied. If you see the symptoms here, don’t abandon agile; reset your conditions for launching agile initiatives.