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Lack of business engagement hinders company agility

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga
Johannesburg, 23 Aug 2017
Biase De Gregorio, head of agile at IQbusiness.
Biase De Gregorio, head of agile at IQbusiness.

While overall the adoption of agile practices in SA is approaching maturity within IT, there still remains a significant number of large organisations that appear to be lagging in their move to agile.

This is the word from Biase De Gregorio, head of agile at independent management consulting firm IQbusiness, speaking at the Agile Africa 2017 conference yesterday in Johannesburg.

Discussing agile adoption in South African organisations, De Gregorio explained agility is a cultural way of doing work, primarily based on creating an environment where organisations are able to deliver products and services in an iterative and incremental manner, where long phases of work are done in shorter life cycles.

"Agile enables organisations to provide products and services at much faster rate, thus enabling end-users to provide feedback at a quicker pace. It develops empowerment in people and teams, creating an opportunity for people to master their creative crafts," he explained.

However, disengagement within the various business divisions makes this hard to achieve, De Gregorio asserted.

Unpacking recent research conducted by IQbusiness titled: "The Path to Business Agility: Mapping Agile Adoption in SA", De Gregorio pointed out there is an urgent need for large organisations to change the way they conduct work, as many take an average of between 18 months and two years to deliver new services and products to the market.

IQbusiness surveyed 276 local individuals across a range of company sizes, industries and levels, and supplemented the findings with in-depth interviews with industry experts, including leaders in organisations going through agile adoptions.

The research reveals that while agile adoption appears to have crossed the chasm, particularly among IT departments of larger enterprises and SMEs, it is, however, still lagging in other business units of large corporates - indicating lack of business engagement, i.e. most agile adoptions are driven by the IT departments and leave business and operations behind.

"Although agile was formalised in 2001, most large corporates (more than 5 000 employees), indicated they have only been using an agile approach for less than two years (55%) or between two and five years (28%). Interestingly, practitioners who took part in the survey had more experience with agile approaches (50%) than the companies which they worked for."

This, he explained, may indicate that larger organisations are currently recruiting practitioners with the necessary experience to expedite agile adoption.

"Over the last seven years of being involved in agile adoptions in SA, I have observed several trends that have made the adoption of agile particularly challenging. These include programme execution - at a team level, agile works well; however, when large programmes of execution are required, managing the delivery becomes a challenge.

"Lack of people change management was one of the biggest challenges faced by organisations. This is because typically agile adoptions are mandated from executives to deliver the promise of agile; however, they underestimate the impact it has on the people."

The research, continued De Gregorio, validated these observations when it revealed 43% of respondents said top management are the primary driver of agile, as they see the need to transform in the organisation.

"A further 8% said the influence comes from within the organisation teams. Another 35% said agile adoption is driven by a combination of teams and top management," he concluded.