Is your company good at Agile but bad at delivery?

What I have come to observe in medium to large organisations that apply Agile is that they are after specific benefits that they believe Agile will provide, but at the same time they don't want to make disruptive changes to the organisation.  They use expressions like "We need to be pragmatic" meaning "Be realistic, we're not going to make that change."

Company leaders predominantly want two primary benefits from Agile:

• Projects to be completed faster.

• The ability to work on new projects when they come along.

They quite often believe that Agile is a magic wand. As if simply changing to Scrum they can achieve "Twice the Work in Half the Time" due to unfortunate messaging by a book of the same title. It’s not enough just to apply Agile Methodologies Knowledge.

Companies will often see improvements once teams move to Scrum, but rarely the "Twice the Work in Half the Time" as promised.  These improvements are quickly absorbed by higher expectations.  Any gain in speed is consumed with increased demand within the portfolio, and soon it feels like nothing has changed.

Scrum teams working hard, and yet work keeps piling up and nothing is getting delivered.

Organisations have realised that Scrum is no good at long-term planning, estimation and scheduling.  Things that senior leaders expect of their software delivery teams.  Scrum makes no promises about completing a project on time, because it takes a short-term, iterative view of work.  Scope expands to satisfy the customer.  So either scope expands and the time allocated to the project is variable, or time is fixed, and the completable scope is largely fixed as a result.

In many projects, companies don't want the scope to expand.  They want to fix their commitment of time/funds/resources.  They often set a project manager in place to constrain the time spent working on a software solution or project, and this limits the iterative improvement approach of Scrum and others.  As a result, software teams don't go any faster, and don't increase their ability to change priority rapidly.

The company is still doing projects, and commits their teams to the project for the duration, and expect the pre-defined scope of work to be completed within an expected time frame. But applying Project Management just slows down delivery further.

The question then is simple - "How do you successfully merge longer term delivery management with business agility?"  The good news is that you can achieve this.  To do this, you must move on from project-based delivery.  That doesn't mean you give up the cost-constraint focus.  It doesn't mean teams work on software indefinitely.  It means teams can work iteratively, build excellent software solutions, report on their progress through a backlog of work or a pre-defined budget, and deliver business outcomes.  All while being able to rapidly pivot priorities when things change suddenly.

You can achieve faster throughput of value, and better results from your portfolio of work.  To do so takes more than just applying Scrum and hoping for the best.  If you want to learn how to apply this within your organisation, I can show you how.

What I have noticed is that organisations are largely unaware of the following:

• You can be good at Agile, but bad at delivery.

• You can be good at delivery, but bad at Agile.

• You can be bad at Agile and bad at delivery.

• Or you can be good at Agile and good at delivery.

Here's how you can improve delivery without applying project management specifically:

• Good at scheduling

• Good at prioritisation of competing priorities

• Good at portfolio pipeline management

• Good at estimation

• Good at capacity management

• Good at decision-making

• Good at team cohesion (no shuffling people)

• Good at financial management

• Good at benefits management

Delivery Leads can help teams improve delivery by providing these skills:

1. Facilitating Agile Ceremonies - Leading sprint planning, retrospectives, stand-ups, and other Agile events

2. Removing Impediments - Identifying and resolving blockers affecting team performance

3. Coaching Teams - Guiding teams on Agile principles and practices

4. Stakeholder Communication - Maintaining transparency with business partners and senior leadership

5. Delivery Planning - Creating and managing delivery roadmaps aligned with business objectives

6. Managing Backlog - Collaborating with Product Owners on backlog prioritization

7. Risk Management - Identifying, assessing, and mitigating delivery risks

8. Performance Monitoring - Tracking team metrics and continuous improvement

9. Resource Management - Coordinating team capacity and capabilities

10. Cross-team Coordination - Managing dependencies across squads and departments