qualities for agile success: how Randstad can help.

For any organization committed to making their operations more efficient, increasing their speed to market, and impressing their customers and end users, an agile transformation has a definite appeal – and for good reason.

We know from our own research that embracing agile has allowed more than 80 percent of C-Level digital leaders to respond more quickly to market changes, which is essential in our fast-moving, ever-changing digital world.

In addition, adopting agile can bring business leaders far greater flexibility, lower their costs, improve employee engagement, lead to better quality products, increase customer satisfaction, reduce risk, and deliver continuous process improvements – all with a greater degree of control than standard waterfall methodologies.

But agile is not without its challenges.

common barriers to agile implementation

Agile practices often start in pockets of IT and fail to spread, show value, or garner interest from the rest of the organization. But the benefits of agile can’t become a reality if an enterprise, its leadership team, or its employees are reluctant to embrace change.

In our work with countless organizations over the years, we’ve found a common thread in cases where agile implementation appears to have failed: 11 patterns of behavior that are typically at the root of problematic agile transformation journeys.

These include:

1. Leveraging a traditional organizational structure that struggles to foster transparency, collaboration, innovation or adaptation from the top down
2. Failing to carry out sufficient upfront planning and accurate estimation
3. Testing at the end of the life cycle, rather than within each sprint
4. Neglecting the implementation of standards, tools and automation
5. Not looking at technical debt throughout the release
6. Failing to set a clear definition of ‘done’
7. Clinging to shared services centralization, which makes collaboration difficult
8. Encountering misalignment across the product life cycle
9. Following a traditional PMO that’s not adapted for agility
10. Abandoning the crucial concept of collaboration
11. Having vendor contracts in place that are contrary to the agile approach

We explore these challenges in greater detail in our agile white paper, and in our blog on the common barriers to agile implementation.

Despite the challenges that many organizations encounter when implementing an agile approach, agile is most definitely worth the effort – and you don’t have to go it alone. Through Randstad’s agile maturity model, it’s easy to identify the essential qualities for agile success.

Randstad’s agile maturity model

Some businesses struggle to shift their governance and metrics from traditional waterfall approaches to an agile methodology; others may lack the ability to effectively report progress in an agile or hybrid environment.

Our agile capability maturity model is flexible enough to adapt to varying customer needs, yet comprehensive enough to ensure that all core agile enablers and capabilities are considered and addressed during the agile lifecycle.

governance and organization 

Agile teams should be self-forming and self-managing, but that doesn’t mean they are totally independent. People need to know and understand their roles and responsibilities, and be able to execute them well. The organization also needs checks and balances – reassurance that budgets are well managed and derive expected business value.

standards and methods

Within agile teams, people need to have a means to learn from each other, and support to improve themselves.

metrics and reporting

Organizations need metrics to evaluate performance against goals, and reporting to make those metrics visible and meaningful. Agile projects are no exception. How are we doing compared to what we planned? This visibility leads to deeper dives into variances, and opportunities to make informed decisions.

tools and methodologies

You can start your agile journey without investing in new tools and technologies, but you’ll only get so far without supporting collaboration platforms, test automation platforms, and automated build and deploy tools.

how Randstad can help

In addition to our agile maturity model, our team of agile experts can also deliver agile transformation, agile training, agile coaching, fully managed agile teams, agile software engineering, and an agile managed resources program.

For years, we’ve worked closely with companies of all sizes to institute and upgrade their agile practices. We can even deploy a comprehensive agile assessment model to scrutinize your readiness for agile, based on the key elements of a successful transformation.

Find out more about Randstad’s agile solutions.