Gunjan Doshi

Today, Court Cunningham and I met with Ken Schwaber over lunch. It was a casual lunch meeting where we talked about topics like critical process practices, agile process adoption, challenges faced by the software engineering community etc.

Ken mentioned couple of interesting statistics. He mentioned that it has been his experience that only around 25% of companies are successful in their pursuit to adopt agility. I found that number shockingly low. Other than one financial client in the past, I think all the agile adoptions, I have seen, have been successful. I think Ken was referring to the challenge in sustaining the adoption after the change to agile is introduced. The satir change model (picture below) can also help explain this better:

A transitioning team needs strong leadership and wisdom to guide them out of the chaos phase to the integration phase. It is only in integration phase that the team starts seeing long term benifits in performance. However, to enter the integration phase, the team has to weather the chaos phase. It is during this phase that many adoptions fail and go awry.
Ken mentioned another interesting metric. He mentioned that there is usually 20% turnover in development and 40% turnover in management due to adoption of agile processes. I will agree with the turnover metric for management. Managers who are used to the traditional waterfall process struggle a lot with the adoption of agile processes. However, my experience with developers has been very positive. They usually have been very happy with the agile transition. Finally, we talked about slow rate of adoption of the agile processes in the New York metro area. Fortunately, the adoption rate is increasing as I am hearing more and more about companies transitioning to agile mindset.

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