In the large majority of cases so-called agile organizations are only agile in part of the organization, if at all. (geek & poke, 2016)
The term agile is typically associated with project management. Agile project management has been highly successful in a large number of contexts, but it has also been criticized and lately even declared dead! But even if we believe that the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated, there usually are some problems related to it and we will discuss one of them below.
This problem relates to being agile in just part of the organization. Our view is that in our current dynamic world, agile approaches (i.e., characterized by adaptability, flexibility and speed) are just as relevant in ongoing activities as in individual projects. And even though the number of organizations claiming to have implemented agile methods or carried out an agile transformation is growing every day, it is in 99 percent of cases only implemented in some part of the organization. Frequently, what has changed is just the mentioned project management or perhaps only the management of IT projects. In some cases, it only concerns one single team having started to experiment with agile methods. Of course, this does not mean that the entire organization has become agile, far from it. We do not wish to downplay the importance of agile methods in IT projects and elsewhere, but one agile leg in an otherwise clumsy body does not make the dog supple and flexible.
Moreover, there is a great risk that the agile parts of the organization end up in conflict with the rest of the organization and its traditional management and bureaucratic culture. Not only are other departments used to longer planning cycles, they also tend to have a different attitude with regard to following plans and rules in a way that agile teams often find rigid. Conversely, what the agile team members think of as agile and effective, people in other departments often consider unprofessional and sloppy.
Sometimes, the management systems are in direct opposition to each other. One example of this is a large Nordic bank using the agile framework SAFe to manage all its IT projects. At the same time, they create a project budget every year, specifying exactly which projects they are going to carry out and how much each project is going to cost. Since deviations from the budget are not acceptable, it is basically impossible to apply SAFe and be agile when it comes to the overall management of IT projects.
You can read much more about this in our book The Agile Company - Beyond Project Management that you find in the links below.
Göran Nilsson & Lennart Francke