The recent trends have been in such a way that almost many technology-based entities and enterprises have been making a changeover, that could precisely be termed as ‘Agile enterprises.’ Every entrepreneur dream would be to make their enterprise strong, fast and rapid and much more flexible for their customers. It is obvious to expect such entrepreneurs to take the necessary steps for this. However, transformation of an entity into an agile enterprise requires not some but a lot of planning and decision making involved. There are a lot of chances for any enterprise to fail if this is not done rightly.
What is agile?
To give a short note about what agile transformation means, it is when the operational model of an enterprise is changed for getting the organisation fast moving, flexible in operations and quick responses to unexpected external or internal forces within the enterprise.
The most common reasons for failure of agile:
So, here in this article you would be reading about the most common reasons for the failure of such transformation of enterprises.
- One of the most common reason observed in the market for the failure of such transformations would be when the existing culture doesn’t get in sync with the new expected functioning. This means that, while an enterprise may have a great vision, understanding the reality of the organization’s existing culture, how a drastic change would evoke reactions and how this would be affecting the way people work.
- On that note, it is important for any enterprise to ensure every department or team’s co-operation in handling such a change. Every employee in the enterprise perform their work based on their salary, incentive, wages, etc. When such a change has a direct monetary act, the willingness of the employee to work further may definitely be affected.
- While it is the need of the company to address the employees and teams on one hand, it is also very important to understand the need to address the executive managers and directors while bringing about an agile element in the enterprise. While implementing such changes in the basic organisation hierarchy and functional structure, the people of the company may acknowledge it, while not everyone may support it.
- Sudden changes are hard to handle for everyone. So, when agile transformation is being planned for the enterprise, another common mistake every person fails to undertake is to go through earlier records of how the organisation has responded to previous changes and analyse this from every perspective like how the sales been affected, how have the employees been affected, how has the working pattern been affected, etc. Once, this is analysed, the way to approach in bringing about such transformation could be worked on.
- Everyone in the field of IT would definitely be aware of the key principles of agile. When it comes to the implementation of these principles, one common element that almost everyone fails to bring in to practicality is measuring progress. As the data in the enterprise keeps flowing in, it is vital that steps are taken and required technical arrangements are made to analyse and evaluate the data. Such measurement, would depict the scenario of the impact of bringing in agile.
- While all these internal reasons may lead to failure of such agile transformation, there is one crucial external reason that has to be taken into consideration. It is most likely that co-operation from the customer side may not be as expected every time. Not every customer’s demand is the same and to stay ahead of their expectation and demands defining a successfully agile transformed enterprise, is not an easy task and many enterprises fail to work this out.
- With the various teams working on a product like coding, testing, analysis, etc., there are certain established ways of working within such teams. When a team completes their task, the other team begins their work. In the market, this is referred to, as the traditional methods of working. When agile is introduced and effective changes are implemented, the working pattern will be changing and not everyone may adapt to this system. Failure of focusing on such transition strategies is another important reason for the overall downfall of the agile.
- Investment in training of the members by leaders in the organisation should mandatorily be done for better performance of the teams. Appropriate efforts should be taken with necessary strategies to tackle disputes. This is not done by every organisation and thus results in lack of knowledge and practical application of such knowledge in handling unforeseen changes.
With this being said, these are some of the most common and popular reasons for the failure of agile transformation of an enterprise. At the end, it lies in the hands of the leaders and entrepreneurs on how the enterprise functions as a whole in contributing to the objectives and goals envisioned by the entrepreneur.