On the final day of Agile 2013, I led a crowd sourced mini-workshop/discussion on Agile pain points. In this post I’ll summarize, with a goal to get into more details over the coming months.
I posted large easel pad sheets on the wall and wrote names of company departments on each sheet. Then I invited the audience to take sticky pads and write their particular pain points and post them under the department causing the pain. After a few minutes, I handed out strips of 8 dots to each participant and invited them to vote on the things that were their biggest pin points. They could use all 8 dots on one, one dot on each of 8, or any variation in between.
A helper reviewed the sheets looking for high numbers of dots. Then we discussed those highest pain points until we ran out of time.
I am still transcribing my recording of that session for notes. But below is the list of departments, pain points, and number of votes for each. 14 people participated in the writing of pain points and voting. Note that things with zero votes are still pain points; they just are not as painful as items with more votes.
What are your pain points? Do you have others?
Geri
Executive / Board of Directors
- 1 – Lack of positive support from executives and on down
- 0 – Want everything now
- 9 – Can’t or won’t prioritize
- 0 – Silos of demand – no overall view
- 0 – Developers think the only reason for our Agile transformation is to save money by firing people
- 3 – Portfolio management
- 2 – Why don’t you ever stick to the plan?
- 0 – Not all management is on board with transformation
Finance
- 0 – Project funding (instead of product funding)
- 6 – Use of estimates – want the budget up front
- 0 – Must capitalize software projects
Legal / Compliance
- 0 – It takes too much time to review documents and contracts
- 3 – Compliance built around waterfall
Human Resources
- 8 – Job titles versus Agile roles = confusion for teams
- 2 – No team based compensation model
- 5 – Performance appraisals / Yearly appraisals
- 0 – Cannot hire excellent co-op who is a rockstar on the team because of his GPA
- 1 – Revolving door staff
- 0 – Compensation model
- 0 – Lack of dedicated resources
IT
- 0 – Security patching that breaks automated tests and slows build times (example you can’t use AWS you have to use the corporate cloud solution but we know it sucks)
- 0 – Project team staffing (staffing a project instead of staffing a team
- 0 – Mainframe developers, long development cycles
- 4 -Still think in terms of projects not products
- 4 – Won’t adopt stable teams
- 3 – Lack of resource dedication and co-location
- 1 – Team members changed in and out based on application expertise
- 7 – Insist on assigning multiple projects to teams at the same time
Product Lines
- 0 – Lack of priorities
- 0 – Lack of backlog
- 0 – Lack of release plans
- 2 – Product Owners are unfamiliar with how to support Agile
Facilities
- 0 – Cube farms
- 0 – Some teams in special rooms, some not
- 0 – The right kind of space
- 7 – Lack of co-location
- 1 – We need more whiteboards
- 3 – Can not modify workspaces
- 0 – Setting up Agile space / colocation
- 0 – You can’t tear down the cube walls due to fire code
- 0 – No flexibility to move around
Customer Support
- 1 – Tier 3 customer support in engineering team takes time away from our work
Center of Excellence
- 4 – Testing in COE’s instead of the team doing the testing
Product Development
- 2 – How people are assigned to teams
- 0 – Defining team structure, competency vs feature
- 9 – Lack of flexibility for scope on projects
- 4 – Product specialist not willing to build minimal features
- 0 – Lack of user stories
Sales
- 0 – Always have most important projects (they think so)
- 7 – Squeaky wheel want it now
Operations
- 2 – Operations is not structured to support Agile
- 0 – Prioritizing epics
- 0 – They don’t work in our Agile teams
- 0 – Can not provide product owner with enough focus
- 4 – Operations can’t match speed of Agile team
- 0 – Can’t take software upgrades more than once per quarter in the factory
- 0 – Defining roles – product owner, scrum master, coach
- 0 – Complex development – red tape
Other
- 0 – Politics – want to say we are doing Agile, no actual support
- 2 – Funding model
- 0 – Just velocity metrics