Agile challenges

“Sometimes the organization isn’t ready for agile”
The most common challenge I usually face during a transition to agile is when the organization isn’t ready
for the application of agile. The second challenge is that it is not always easy for the business side of a
company to engage. Agile project management simply cannot fit every organization. They already need to
have the correct enterprise environmental factors in place to apply an agile approach successfully.
Alternatively, you must receive strong commitment from senior management.
“Working in different time zones can be difficult”
Distributed teams are becoming the norm within agile projects. However, I sometimes find working with a
distributed team very challenging. Coordinate meetings or concurrent work in different time zones can be
difficult and not always feasible. The time zones problem can be eased with tele/videoconference tools, and
distributing necessary common work in a geographically sustainable way (contiguous time zones). In my
experience, it is impossible to avoid some out of work call. A little sacrifice and good will is required.
Moreover, distributed teams tend to have less sense of belonging. The sense of belonging is hard to create,
but I have seen that even a couple of face-to-face meetings can do the trick. Distributed teams tend to work
together in a better way if the members know each other personally.
There is no “one size fits all” approach.
Still, I believe distributed teams are a great opportunity. We are able to reach, engage and work side by
side with the best talents from all around the world.
“Team members can be scared of failure”
In my experience, estimations are always tricky. People tend to fear being tied to something that could
easily be wrong. To make this easier I believe that you should create an environment based on trust and
respect, in which people are allowed to make mistakes. In a trusted environment, everybody is eager to
commit themselves to an estimation. This is also true for managing issues with honesty and accountability.
In an environment based on trust and respect, everybody is eager to assume responsibilities. Sprints need
to be kept short enough so that they won’t have a big impact on the project if they fail. In my opinion, it’s
better to abort a sprint that to waste money in producing something wrong.
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Emanuele Passera
Project Manager and Software Engineer
Emanuele Passera
Project Manager and Software Engineer at Tele-Rilevamento Europa T.R.E. s.r.l.
www.emanuelepassera.com

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“We can’t mess up or the Scrum Police will come and take us away”
I think with Scrum in particular there’s a fear of doing it “wrong,” especially among marketers. We have a
sense that it’s a sacred way of working that we can’t mess up or the Scrum Police will come and take us
away. But really every team — dev, IT, or marketing — makes adjustments as they go along. That’s the
whole point of continuous improvement.
“Marketers sometimes don’t play well with others”
On marketing teams you nearly always get one hold out, someone who just doesn’t truck with this
new-fangled way of doing things. They’re actually the most dangerous, because they aren’t so opposed
that they speak up, they just dig in their heels and quietly hold up the whole team.
Marketers sometimes don’t play well with others. We like to get credit for our work, and with Scrum it’s all
about the team. If there are team members like this, you’ve got to work extra hard to praise their individual
impact in a one-on-one setting so they feel appreciated and validated. However, the primary emphasis
outside those cheerleading sessions remains on the team’s achievements and problems.
I don’t know if conflict is more common on marketing teams than on dev teams, but the Superman complex
that many marketers harbor can definitely get in the way of a team-centric approach and cause some
friction.
“Lack of trust in the agile process”
I find that marketers can often lack trust in the agile process. They sometimes have a hard time believing
it’s really going to work, or that it’s really going to do all the great things they’ve heard about. A couple of
iterations in, and that usually goes away.
“Managing relationships with freelancers and agencies”
There are skill gaps that marketers are accustomed to filling with freelancers and/or agencies, so if those
relationships start to interfere with the team’s ability to successfully complete sprints, they will become a
challenge that needs to be addressed.
In my case, outside interference is far and away the most common cause of sprint failure.
Executive/stakeholder “emergencies” combined with demands from other departments are the bane of just
about every agile marketing team I know.
Andrea Fryrear
Speaker, Author, Agile Marketing Consultant

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“Creatives tend to struggle with estimations”
Creatives definitely have more trouble estimating. Sometimes it takes them half a day to complete an
article, and other times they struggle with it for three or four days. It’s a legitimate problem, and one that we
typically solve by relying on data — how long does it usually take them — and communicating heavily if it
looks like they’re going to miss that mark.
Choosing the best estimation method has also been particularly difficult in my experience — we’ve tried
t-shirt sizes, Fibonacci, and even hours, and there isn’t one that seems to work for everybody. It’s just a
matter of trial and error, finding the method that reflects how a team thinks. Getting tasks and stories down
to standard sizes really helps too.
“Snacks, chocolate, or beer help to keep meetings varied”
I often experience problems with employee engagement during daily Scrum meetings. This can happen
particularly if part of the team (the content marketers, for example) are involved with projects that don’t
touch the other team members. It’s hard to stay focused when you believe that someone’s updates aren’t
going to affect you. We’ve tried using a more Kanban-style stand up where the discussion centres on
planning and strategizing for the day, rather than the traditional 3-part yesterday/today/block structure,
which seems to help.
As a Scrum Master I take great pains to vary the format of meetings without changing their objectives,
particularly with retrospectives. Asking different questions, using different conversation starters, and just
basically being creative helps people look forward to them. I also recommend bribery via snacks, chocolate,
or beer.
If you suspect someone of being less than truthful, the meeting is not the appropriate context for discussing
that. The Scrum Master and/or marketing manager would need to address the situation with the offending
team member separately, with a focus on getting to the root of why they felt they couldn’t be honest with the team.
Andrea Fryrear
Top-ranked Speaker, prolific Author, and Agile marketing Consultant. CCO of Fox
Content and Editor in Chief of TheAgileMarketer.net.

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Martin Wickman
Senior IT Consultant Developer and Agile Coach
“Too trusting of early estimates”
It’s hard to accurately estimate software tasks. Really hard. Organizations often request estimates that
span months or even longer. In my experience, new development teams can estimate a couple of days’
work with precision, a week with some luck and maybe two weeks with some dignity still intact. More than
that, and we’re entering unknown territory and are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong. That’s just how it
is and we need to accept that. Unfortunately, estimates are often given as deadlines to the customer which
then expects the team to deliver on the mark.
But the nice thing here is that self-organizing teams do become better with time and practice. Give them
two-three sprints, allow them to fail, allow them to grow and allow them to learn. After a while, estimates will
get better and the team’s velocity becomes stable enough to make more educated projections.
Note the word projection here. The idea is to be able to say something like: ”We’re confident that we can
finish these 20 stories, and we’re 60% certain that we can complete 25 stories, but it’s near impossible to
finish all 40 stories”. Now the organization can make real business decisions based on reasonable
projections.
“Skimping on retrospectives”
Scrum teams run retrospective meetings. It goes like this: Sit around for a while. Talk some. Vote on some
items. Get back to work. Done.
Sorry, but that won’t cut it.
You see, the only way to improve is to get honest feedback and then act on it. That’s how we can figure out
better ways to work and avoid making the same mistakes again. Retrospective meetings are created for
that particular reason: to improve how your team works by looking back at what happened and then decide
how to change based on that.
Skipping this part is one of the main reasons team fail. It’s worth spending some time learning about this.
Your team will thank you for it!
“Not understanding the process”
Lots of project managers fresh out of school (or just, well, old-school) don’t understand what agile is about.
What I see is the tendency to simply map known concepts with this weird Scrum thing and then carry on as
if it’s business as usual.
So daily Scrum meeting becomes daily status meeting, product owner becomes project manager; stories
equals tasks; team members becomes interchangeable resources; sprints becomes schedules and
estimates turn into hours and deadlines on a spread sheet, and so on... Result:disaster.

It’s easy to fix though. All it takes is just one hour.
Print out a copy of the Scrum guide and read it. It’s like ten pages of text. Ten measly pages. It’s not a hard
read. It can be a bit scary at first, but not hard. Just do it. Please.
“Teams need guidance to reach awesomeness”
All teams have to pass through a bunch of phases on their journey to greatness. These phases are called
forming, storming, norming and performing. Long story short: forming is when they meet and everything is
new and exciting. After some time, the team enters the dreaded storming phase. This is where the struggle
for power and control happens. People show distrust, disagreement and form alliances. It can be nasty.
What happens now is they start bouncing back and forth between the forming and storming phase. You
see, as soon as they get to the storming phase, people tend to back off and move back into the forming
phase again — the safety zone. And the cycle repeats itself…
In my experience, teams left to fend for themselves almost never get past the storming phase. More time
will not help here. I’ve seen lots of teams that have been working together for years and still don’t manage
to progress any further.
The way to navigate this storm is to recognize it as something perfectly natural, but also realize it won’t fix
itself. The team needs guidance to reach awesomeness. They need someone with experience and
coaching skills to navigate this part. Maybe the Scrum master can help or maybe you need to bring in a
dedicated agile coach. Whatever you do, don’t let them handle it on their own.
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Martin Wickman
Martin has been working with dev teams for the last 20 years, focusing on
developing awesome software and helping teams take the next step to more
productivity and agile goodness. Author of Effective Agile Meetings and can be
found on mwickman.com.

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For the majority of companies I have consulted, these are the most common challenges: silos of
knowledge, managers with the famous ‘command and control’ attitude and a lack of agile culture.
“Silos of knowledge”
One of the biggest challenges agile projects face is related to silos of knowledge. The term Subject Matter
Expert (SME) is an overvalued concept if you have only one SME for each product or business domain in
your company. This is because the SME will be a bottleneck in the short term. In Scrum projects, we work
together as a team and everybody must know about all products to avoid dependencies.
What can you do to eliminate silos? Well, as an example, let’s say you hire some new developers who don’t
know how to deal with legacy code (most companies have one or more). Those developers will have to
request the help of the SME. This situation is quite normal if you have two or more SMEs, but if you have
only one SME to assist the new guys, then that SME is a great impediment.
The best approach to eliminate this kind of silo is to use a controversial technique called ‘Pair
Programming’. With this technique, two developers share the keyboard when they are developing code.
This means the SME can fix a bug from the legacy code and the new guy can start learning the code.
Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan uses the ‘work in pairs’ approach for
everything, in order to avoid silos. In my opinion, this is awesome!
“Managers with a ‘command and control’ attitude”
Based on my experience, managers who use the famous ‘command and control’ approach don’t trust their
employees.
Imagine the following situation: your company starts to use Scrum when managing IT projects. During the
sprint planning, Scrum team members decide to work in five user stories for the next two weeks
(assuming that period of time for the length of the sprint). However, after a couple of days, the manager
decides to add a couple of bugs in production and other user stories he considers necessary. The message
to team members in this situation is: ‘our manager doesn’t trust our capacity to plan. He thinks that we are
lazy and added more duties for us’.
My recommendation for this issue is that managers have to become leaders. It means that they have to
build a safety ecosystem where team members can excel. Furthermore, as a leader, you should push your
employees to read, participate in workshops and create a community of practices.
“Lack of agile culture”
If a company wants to adopt agile they must build a culture to support the agile principles. Everybody has
Mario Lucero
Freelance Enterprise Agile Coach & Change Agent

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to pursue one common and big goal - the company goal.
I have come to realise that, in many companies, each business unit is concerned only in achieving his
targets. Most of the time, the employees achieved their goals, but as they did not work as a team, the goal
of the business wasn’t reached. To avoid each employee being concerned only about business unit metrics,
you have to adopt the mantra: Collaborate, Collaborate and Collaborate.
To adopt agile successfully, it is also necessary to have a culture of transparency that improves the morale
of employees. For instance, there are companies (unfortunately not many) in which employees know how
much their coworkers earn or salaries are listed publically.
“The agile mindset”
Agile is about mindset, but it is being corrupted by approaches which put more emphasis on tools and
processes. The key to the mindset is the ability and willingness to learn. In a complex world, your only
chance for survival is learning.
Mario Lucero
Mario is an Agile Coach, Consultant and Scrum Trainer based in Santiago
(Chile), who helps organizations deliver high quality software with predictability
and happiness. Agilelucero.com/

“Scrum is easy. People are hard.”
What’s the biggest challenge when adopting Scrum? That’s easy. The start. Here’s why:
• At the start, we ask this newly christened product owner to write requirements from a customer’s
perspective. That’s really, really hard, and that’s often their first exposure to Scrum.
• At the start, we stick a group of specialized team members in a room and ask them to understand each
other’s languages and focus on the team over their specialty. It hurts.
• At the start, we ask a scrum master with just a two-day course under their belt and limited Scrum
experience to shepherd this team to success. It’s scary, and s/he is often unprepared for what’s to come.
There’s more than just these three bullets, but I think you see the dilemma. The root of the problem is
simple really: Scrum is easy. People are hard.
The solution? Hire someone with a wealth of agile coaching experience to model agile behaviours and
educate team members, product owners, Scrum Masters, and leadership. But if you know little about
Scrum, how do you know the person you’re hiring is worth his/her weight? That can be deceptively difficult.
“What other challenges have I faced with a Scrum adoption?”
That’s a tough question. Narrowing a list to down just a few is a challenge. Why? Scrum often runs counter
to an organization’s culture so every adoption is different. Imagine if I told a project manager to toss out his
gantt chart and risk register. We don’t need it; we’ll just figure these things out as we go. This PM would
likely pass out! And that’s also how myths get started about how agile teams don’t plan. It’s simply not true.
We often plan more than a traditional team. But I digress. Let’s talk about some of those common challenges:
“Scrum is a problem-finding, not a problem-solving framework”
When Scrum is first introduced to an organization, it exposes a great deal of dysfunction. This is intentional.
People solve problems, new processes and new tools don’t. When’s the last time you’ve seen a hammer
swing itself? I think you see my point. Often, this dysfunction is attributed to the organization’s Scrum
adoption. After all, we didn’t see all these problems until we adopted Scrum so Scrum is obviously the
problem. If we do away with it, these problems will go away. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Cargo cults kill Scrum”
In World War II, Japanese and later Allied forces placed an air base on a remote island. On this island was
an indigenous tribe never before exposed to modern technology and comforts. After the war, Allied forces
abandoned the air base, and the tribe no longer had access to these comforts. The tribe assumed that if
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Tanner Wortham
Silicon Valley Agile Coach and Author

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they build planes themselves, the Allies would return so the tribe began building planes out of whatever
they had available, usually sticks and branches. Organizations often form cargo cults. They adopt Scrum,
but instead of doing anything differently, they simply relabel existing meetings and processes with Scrum
nomenclature. Here’s a common example. Instead of calling it a status meeting, we’ll call it a stand up. It’ll
continue to be 30 minutes, but we’ll have more of them, and we’ll stand up when we do.
“Shops who claim to be agile, but release three times a year”
I met Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, several months ago while he was in Silicon Valley. I could
sense his frustration when he talked about many shops who claim to be agile but release only two or three
times a year. Part of the beauty of Scrum is that we deliver working software at the end of every sprint,
which can be anywhere from a week to four weeks long. We do so because we inspire great conversations
with our customers when we give them something they can touch and interact. Additionally, it allows us a
great deal of freedom when it comes time to release our product. After all, we don’t need to integrate or
harden our product; we’ve been doing so every sprint. It’s incredibly challenging for teams to switch from a
mindset of delivering once a year to delivering every few weeks, but it’s possible. Our teams at Study.com
release often. Not once a sprint. Not once a day. But anywhere from 2 to 5 times a day. It took time, blood,
sweat, and tears to get there, but it’s been worth it.
Tanner Wortham
A.U.S. Marine turned Software Engineer turned Agilist. Tanner helps teams
improve by reflecting behaviors and helping them find simple solutions to
complicated problems. Learn more at his blog at Spikesandstories.com

Recently I got asked what I consider the most common challenges with agile projects. These are projects
that have such a high rate of uncertainty and complexity on how and what to build, an agile approach is
necessary. Although my gut feeling immediately provided an answer, I gave myself some more time to think
about the question. However, this week my initial thoughts proved to be correct. Without any doubt! The #1
challenge with agile projects is ensuring the right side of the Agile Manifesto truly enables and strengthens
the left side. In this article I’ll explain the reasons behind this statement by exploring the Agile Manifesto and
the misunderstandings about it.
“The Agile Manifesto”
In my role as an Agile Coach, the Agile Manifesto acts as guidance. The 4 values and 12 underlying
principles support me exploring options to daily issues, challenges and questions. I’ve read many books
about agile software and product development, but the original manifesto remains my primary source to
think about agile related questions.
See the Agile Manifesto here.
“What we all agree upon”
I’ve worked in quite a few different organizations. Without exception, every organization wants what the
Agile Manifesto values. Of course it should be about collaboration, teamwork and open communication.
Sure, working software or a working product is what it should be all about. Without doubt everyone wants
a fruitful partnership with their customers. And yes, we all understand that we live in a VUCA world. A world
with a high rate of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In such a world organizations need to
respond to change quickly to become or remain successful.
But…
We do need to respect current processes and tooling; this is simply necessary considering the legislation.
We do need to write proper documentation. The more complex the product, the more time we should spend
on determining how to build it, and of course we should write down all our thoughts (guesses and
assumptions).
We do need a contract that protects us when it gets tough. Even better: let’s describe the desired result in
the contract in as much detail as possible. At least that won’t cause any misunderstandings.
We do need a plan. Where would we be without a plan? Although it’s quite difficult to predict what’s going to
happen upcoming year, we do need a detailed plan that eases the minds of our stakeholders. Even better:
let’s create the plan upfront and give it to the supplier. The only thing that the supplier has to do is execute
the plan. How difficult can it be?
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Barry Overeem
The Learning Facilitator for Agile Teams

“The big misunderstanding”
There is nothing wrong with processes, tooling, documentation, contracts and plans. But they should all
enable the left side of the Agile Manifesto! Not the other way around!
Processes and tools are valuable. But they should enable the collaboration, interactions and dialogues of
all the individuals involved.
There’s nothing wrong with documentation. But don’t write everything down for the sake of documentation.
In the end it’s all about working software or working products. Only working software will help you to
validate if you’re building the right product right.
Contracts are important. They can offer everyone clarity and guidelines on what to expect from each other.
But don’t expect a great collaboration with your customer when the contract says “we don’t trust you!”
Plans can be useful. But in the end it’s all about the conversations we have with each other to create
common understanding about the desired results. Remember:
“Planning is everything, plans are nothing.” – Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke.
“The #1 challenge with agile projects”
Every organization wants to be agile. Every organization wants the necessary agility to deal with the
increasing rate of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The Agile Manifesto offers 4 values and
12 principles to support organizations build software/products in such a complex environment. Many
organizations acknowledge these values and principles. However, ensuring the right side of the Agile
Manifesto truly enables and strengthens the left side is the #1 challenge with agile projects. It’s a
challenge organizations must deal with, otherwise projects with a high rate of complexity and
unpredictability are bound to fail!
“To conclude”
I do want to close this blog post with a positive note. Although the struggle with the values of the Agile
Manifesto is a common challenge, organizations do accept more often that change is necessary and
inevitable. Doing some agile practices mechanically isn’t enough. Agile projects will only become
successful when the values and principles are truly embraced and put into practice.
What do you consider the #1 challenge with agile projects?
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Barry Overeem
The Learning Facilitator for Agile Teams. Blogger at barryovereem.com

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