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Lee Cunningham on the 13th State of Agile Report

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Lee Cunningham about the latest State of Agile report, recently released by Collabnet/VersionOne.  

Key Takeaways

  • This is the 13th year the State of Agile report has been released
  • There is a strengthening of momentum towards holistic value stream management
  • Most organisations are adopting agile for the right reasons: they are trying to accelerate the ability to get software built with high quality and get it into the hands of their customers, managing changing priorities and improve alignment between IT and business groups
  • The factors that impact success for scaling agile adoption are having internal agile coaches, executive coaches, company-provided training, consistent practices and processes and implementation of a common tool
  • Adoption of value stream thinking and integrating end-to-end delivery is an important goal that advanced organisations are adopting, but it’s a significant change that is not easy

Show Notes

  • 00:45 Introductions
  • 00:58 The intent of the State of Agile report – to poll the world and see what’s working, what’s not working and what the trends are in agile development
  • 01:40 There are normally not huge inflections from year to year, trends are
  • 02:00 There is a strengthening of momentum towards holistic value stream management
  • 02:14 The impediments to adopting agile remain consistent over multiple years
  • 02:24 The biggest impediment to effective agile adoption is organisational culture
  • 03:04 Most organisations are adopting agile for the right reasons: they are trying to accelerate the ability to get software built with high quality and get it into the hands of their customers, managing changing priorities and improve alignment between IT and business groups
  • 03:38 The concept of value stream from concept to customer is an important driver for change in many organisations
  • 04:04 The most frequently cited benefits organisations get from agile adoption are the ability to manage changing priorities, improve project visibility, have alignment between IT and business goals and improve team morale
  • 05:01 The small proportion of organisations who are achieving high maturity with the agile technical practices
  • 06:27 The majority of organisations indicate they are doing OK with practice maturity, but still have a long way to go
  • 07:01 The survey respondents represent a wide global reach, with North America accounting for less than half of the answers this year
  • 07:19 There are significant geographic differences in the adoption of scaling approaches around the world
  • 08:06 The factors that impact success for scaling agile adoption are having internal agile coaches, executive coaches, company-provided training, consistent practices and processes and implementation of a common tool
  • 08:42 It is vital that the people in the organisation own their own transformation – it’s not something that can be outsourced to a consulting firm
  • 09:28 Organisations who are making a serious commitment and growing their own people into coaching roles have often tried different approaches previously and failed
  • 10:50 The factors that get in the way of successful adoption
  • 11:48 Wide disparity in practices and tools across many parts of an organisation doesn’t scale
  • 12:32 At scale you need decentralized control with commonality across teams
  • 12:50 If you’re not DevOps, you’re not cool
  • 13:05 DevOps is about being able to deliver quickly, at high quality, reduce risk and increase customer satisfaction
  • 13:25 The importance of delivering what is built into the operating environment
  • 14:25 The uptake rate of DevOps is faster than agile adoption was in the early days because it is building on the foundations that agile adoption provides
  • 14:47 Adoption of value stream thinking and integrating end-to-end delivery is an important goal that advanced organisations are adopting, but it’s a significant change that is not easy
  • 15:28 The lean ideas that underpin value stream approaches
  • 16:02 Value stream management is a holistic way of viewing agile & devops and improving outcomes
  • 16:23 Lee’s plea to organisations to remove the cultural and management impediments to agile adoption

Mentioned:

From time to time InfoQ publishes trend reports on the key topics we’re following, including a recent one on DevOps and Cloud.  So if you are curious about how we see that state of adoption for topics like Kubernetes, Chaos Engineering, or AIOps point a browser to http://infoq.link/devops-trends-2019.

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