Wag the Dog (Agile)

Agile drawback

I have been concerned that agile software development can wag the dog (Business) and confuse a lot on what’s real value in the business. Many companies, which especially 100% agile teams running their business, are now lost for the business focus. The agile team sometimes doesn’t care about the business-wise value but their only own team’s value. (out of control)

Let me bring a simple example.

(Case) The company heavily relied on legacy systems and infrastructure which must be revamped, so the infrastructure manager decided to revamp the infrastructure by end of the year. The infrastructure will be changed at the end of the month, while other agile teams stopped the project because of their VERY IMPORTANT release for their own application. After all, the infrastructure revamp project had been delayed and the system started functioning abnormally. It ended up the entire business was stopped for 5 months.

Of course, the story was from all my head. But isn’t it right that you have similar experiences if your company has many agile teams running autonomously?

Agile will deteriorate your business agility if just only one agile team is an antagonist to other teams and doesn’t know how to manage their agile team among the entire agile organization.

Ask yourself, agile software development is really bringing agility to your entire business or JUST to ONLY YOUR TEAM. Agile isn’t an almighty thing to resolve all problems the business has, rather it often will block your business from being more flexible and agile.