Idea in Brief
The Problem
Agile methodology has been widely adopted in recent years, but large-scale initiatives often disrupt organizations and fail to meet their goals.
The Typical Causes
Companies often staff an agile team only with stars, overloading them; isolate the team from the main business to protect it, inadvertently impeding its access to crucial capabilities; and dedicate all members 100% to the team, which is unrealistic and unnecessary.
The Solution
Staff the team with “hidden stars”—people who have lower profiles and are less likely to be maxed out. Identify people who can help the team pull in or provide expertise as needed. Organizational network analysis, a methodology for mapping informal and formal relationships, can help with these tasks.
Created by a group of software developers in 2001, the agile methodology, which helps project teams achieve objectives quickly in rapidly changing or unpredictable environments, is now being used broadly throughout organizations. But wanting to be agile and being it are two different things. Our research, which looked at the agile initiatives of scores of companies over several years, reveals that many large-scale ones not only fail to meet their goals but also cause disruption within an organization. A poorly managed initiative can miss critical deadlines, slow product development, and lead to staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams. In one survey of 112 companies that we conducted, nearly 90% reported that they had struggled with rolling out organization-wide agile transformations, even after succeeding with initial small-scale projects.
