On Product Development and More...

I recently attended an excellent event sponsored by the Silicon Valley Agile Leadership Network, entitled, "The Pains of Agile Transformation".


During the event, the audience of software development professionals (mostly scrum masters, product owners, agile project managers and the like) divided into smaller teams to discuss the impediments they were experiencing with agile adoption within their respective organizations.

Collectively, the teams came up with a very extensive list of issues impeding their current agile transformation. The biggest issues included:

• Lack of full executive support
• Teams stuck in "plan based" approach and unable/unwilling to work together and self-organize
• Lack of trust between executives and team
• Geographically distributed teams
• Teams interrupted by urgent activities/projects
• Middle Management not understanding their role
• Middle/Upper Management not "on board"
• Weak Product Owners

Afterwards, a panel of agile coaches discussed ways to address those pain points.

Stacey Louie, one of the event organizer's, was not shocked by the list. He cited a VersionOne survey indicating that these were common issues with agile transformations.

Great food for thought.