What do you need for a successful enterprise agile transformation? According to some texts, you need commitment from the CxO suite and buy in from the guys doing the work.
But, I’ve never seen that work. To go one step further, the bigger the enterprise, the more likely a transformation is to fail. The reason? In a word, the ABOMM.
I regularly meet organizations that are excited about their upcoming agile transformation. In the face of that positive atmosphere, it’s hard to point out that adopting agile and scrum has hidden costs. In the past, I’ve always mentioned two sobering statistics. I’ve just added a third.
The three pillars of empricism are: Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation. Without transparency, your inspection is rendered worthless and any adaptations based on that inspection are flawed. This is basic and obvious. Everyone can understand it. Yet many scrum adoptions suffer because of it.
Why do we make such an obvious and fundamental mistake? Here’s one perspective, and one solution.