While Agile is now the de facto approach to delivering software in the global digital economy, it is not well regarded by a significant proportion of IT leaders.
A survey of CIOs in the UK and US, commissioned by London-based independent IT consultancy, 6Point6, revealed that more than half the 300 CIOs quizzed have lost confidence in Agile and regard Agile development as "discredited"; and three-quarters (75%) were no longer prepared to defend it.
Half (50%) of the CIOs representing organisations that employed approximately 1 300 people on average with revenues of £127million, who had been using Agile for seven years on average and had been involved in around 32 Agile projects, said they now thought of Agile as "an IT fad".
Nevertheless, CIOs in the UK said they would be involved in more than six Agile projects over the course of the next 12 months despite the fact that one in eight Agile projects in the UK failed completely and nearly a third (32%) failed to some degree. Just 7% of CIOs stated that Agile had never failed them. Unless this was addressed, British businesses were set to waste an estimated £37 billion on failed IT projects in the next 12 months.
According to Chris Porter, Director of Digital Transformation at 6Point6 and author of An agile agenda: how CIOs can navigate the post-agile era whitepaper which was based on the survey results, the situation was worse in the US. There, Agile IT projects lasted longer and were more expensive, yet the rate of failure was higher.
Porter maintained that in many respects, Agile had become a victim of its own success. More than half of CIOs (52%) said they now used Agile for all projects with just 1% claiming to have never used it and 7% saying they would not be undertaking any Agile IT projects in the next 12 months.
"Agile's cultural impact on the IT industry has fuelled possibly one of the most dynamic and innovative periods in recent history," Porter said. He attributed its uptake to the fact that technology innovation and digital disruption had become progressively important drivers in the business world.
This had put CIOs under increasing pressure to deliver change, forcing them to push the boundaries of what the original Agile philosophy had anticipated.
Porter believed that at the time of the original Agile manifesto in 2001, Agile was a reaction against the very forces that were now testing its limits - "the forces of scale, globalisation, commercial disaggregation, cost reduction and the need to provide more certainty and transparency to nontechnical business leaders, who increasingly rely on technology innovation in order to compete in the global economy."
Porter believed that one of the major problems associated with Agile today, was that some parts of the Agile Manifesto had been interpreted as a justification to abandon some key practices that are vital to success in IT, such as planning and documentation. When reading the Manifesto (see below), the word 'over' was being interpreted as 'instead of', rather than 'before but in addition to'.
"Our research demonstrates that the principles of the Agile Manifesto need to be augmented in practice and that CIOs need to relearn some of the lessons discarded by the original Manifesto," he concluded.
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