Agile works great, when it works. It tends to be most successful in small companies, with small teams that can work completely independently of others. It tends to fail when more teams are involved, when there are dependencies between them. Even though we’re “doing Scrum”, it still just doesn’t yield the promised benefits. When agile fails it can be disappointing and costly. People get blamed, agile gets blamed, the training gets blamed, and the organizational culture gets blamed. Yet companies keep trying. Many companies make multiple attempts to transition to agile because they’ve bought in to the underlying principles of agile and see it as a solution to their problem hitting dates, their long time to market, their slow return on investment, and their quality problems.

In this talk we’ll examine 8 causes for Agile’s failure in large enterprises, and why starting a transformation with culture or even practices isn’t the solution. We’ll examine why the ultimate solution begins with putting in place the certain organizational structures and planning a journey through predictability on our way to adaptability. Specifically, to begin we need a thoughtful mix of product or feature teams and component or service teams, as cross functional as practicable in each instance; agile structures above the team; and appropriate agile governance at the portfolio and program management layers. This creates an environment in which agile can begin to stick, can begin to deliver value, and creates a platform from which we can move on to increased agility.