Underfunded, Undervalued and Misunderstood: How Businesses Can Accelerate the Adoption of Agile

Apptio is a Business Reporter client.

Every business wants to be more agile and resilient. The ability to rapidly launch new products and quickly adapt business models is key to success in our modern age, as organizations contend with more competitors and external pressures than ever before.

For many, the answer is capital-"A" Agile. Once the preserve of nimble tech startups, all manners of businesses have become excited at the prospect of this discipline that can deliver quicker and better results through iterative, innovative development, rather than through static waterfall projects. As a result, Agile is an increasingly common approach at businesses of all sizes and across all types of work, and "productifying" internal initiatives such as infrastructure development and marketing is now almost as common as external product development.

As with any innovation, it's a race to get there first. Agile adoption is up from 37% in 2020 to 84% in 2021, according to the 15th Annual State of Agile Report. Businesses that can make the full shift ahead of their competitors stand up to reap the benefits.

But despite all the benefits and moves toward Agile, widescale adoption among large businesses remains slow because Agile is usually underfunded, undervalued and misunderstood. To adopt it successfully, businesses need to first gain a full understanding of where and how they should implement it, and then find and fund the frameworks and tools that improve and accelerate adoption.

The importance of self-assessment

The initial challenge holding back effective adoption of Agile is that businesses often don't know where to start. Agile is a radical departure from the industry-standard project method and requires fundamental change—itself no mean feat. To overcome hesitancy or poor implementation, businesses need to properly assess how they are set up to start implementing Agile, and identify what changes are needed to enable it.

In approaching this challenge, technology business management company Apptio has identified two areas that businesses should asses themselves on: enterprise Agile maturity, or how well set up they are for Agile at an enterprise level in terms of leadership, culture and tools; and lean portfolio management capabilities, which cover how prepared they are at an operational level to run Agile initiatives while aligning with and reporting performance against strategic objectives.

Apptio’s Agile Maturity Assessment provides businesses with an instant report on their capabilities in these areas, allowing them to benchmark themselves against their peers. This insight is vital in helping Agile to succeed, as high enterprise Agile maturity with poor lean portfolio management capabilities often causes Agile projects to struggle, as teams can't prove their value and impact to management, while the inverse imbalance results in unrealistic delivery expectations for Agile teams. Understanding the current balance between both is key to knowing where to start with Agile implementation, and what changes need to be made to support it.

Move fast but don't break things

Even after getting management and Agile teams on the same page, the biggest challenge organizations face is accelerating adoption. Delays often come about because Agile is at odds with the waterfall method of project management traditionally used by upper management and finance, and it can take time and effort to match value from one model to the other.

Management and finance teams are used to deciding on a plan, investing in it throughout development, launching and then assessing value. The Agile process of flexing as a team to go out on sprints, learn from releases and then go back to rework and sprint again breaks with this model, requiring value to be measured more regularly against strategic goals.

This challenge is further exacerbated when multiple decentralized Agile teams in different regions are working on different elements of a larger initiative. Collating all these disparate assessments of investment and value make it hard for management to get a clear, unified picture of how Agile implementations are proceeding.

A change is needed to overcome this problem. Through 2024, software engineering leaders who use tools and methods to support remote Agile work as the default are projected to see 20% gains in productivity and 50% lower attrition. However, many of the traditional tools used by Agile teams to enable their work, remote or otherwise, don't by themselves provide the right data to match value with business goals.

Finding the right tools and frameworks

The solution for businesses is twofold. First, they need to implement an Agile framework that provides clear processes and governance to ensure the team's work is fully aligned with overall business value. One of the most effective examples is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which is specifically designed to allow large numbers of Agile teams to work closely together and jointly report against business goals. Commonly agreed metrics and reporting processes are used so that full transparency can be built around Agile projects, which prevents teams from working on projects that aren't contributing to overall value.

The second part of the solution is the deployment of dedicated EAP tools, such as Apptio Targetprocess, which allow organizations to pull the relevant data concerning labor, investment and outcomes from existing Agile tools and report back to the rest of the business. This is important, because while frameworks such as SAFe endure that teams are working toward the same goal, there's still a lot of work involved in collating the data and outputs and presenting them in a manner that finance can understand. Tools such as Targetprocess help automate this process while also providing additional functionality to support planning for future investments.

With enthusiasm for Agile gaining pace, it's important that businesses take steps now to accelerate adoption. Those that can develop an understanding of the preparedness and use frameworks and tools to ensure effective value delivery and funding for Agile teams stand to overtake their competitors in the future.

Visit apptio.com/lpmsurvey to assess if your organization is ready to embrace the benefits of scaled Agile and lean portfolio management in today’s digital world. 

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter. Image Credit: iStock id1221282277