10 Reasons Why Agile Transformations Fail (and How To Fix Them)

Summary: The present-day market scenarios require organizations to operate with new capabilities that enhance overall performance, revenue, and customer base. Successful organizations must become more open to evolution at all levels – teams, structures, and technology. Agile transformation, therefore, is an essential component and failure to follow more often than not, leads to the loss in terms of work processes, product quality, and revenues. But what are the challenges to this transformation? And why do agile transformations fail? Below we look at the top reasons for failure and how you can succeed.

Agile is all about ‘iterations.’ In the process of software development, it implies creating products with increments & iterations – also called ‘Sprints.’ Based on a pragmatic approach to product development, it enhances the product quality and aids the teams in focusing on users and core business.

The Agile Manifesto lists the following as the basic principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change by following a plan

The agile transformation will include an organization’s total metamorphosis – the journey implies moving from bureaucratic structures to more adaptable ones. It also means creating environments of innovation & flexibility along with speed in working. Employee empowerment is a vital ingredient to this recipe for agility.

Adopting agile habits means working on the practices, processes, frameworks, etc. The product and software teams can achieve this through frequent collaboration, feedback, and product release. The transformation will include large-scale organizational changes – strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology. Adoption can improve value delivery, flexibility, and quality, and transformation works on the structure & decision-making processes. You could always turn to and depend on an efficient agile scrum development company for the digital services it offers to help you with the agile transformation and software solutions.

Over two decades since the Agile Manifesto, 50-96% of agile transformation processes fail because of an inability to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in a productive and cost-efficient manner. That’s an alarming agile transformation failure rate indeed!

There could be many reasons why agile transformations fail, and here are some more prominent ones that come up as challenges for organizations on their agile journey.