The answer is quite easy and you should know, but I’ll show you a slide to explain it better.
In a previous post, I have shown what I understand to be the greatest difference between a Traditional (Waterfall) Project and an Agile Project.
When writing, the difference is tiny. But there is a big gap when we talk thinking in the cultural aspect of them.
I have joined in a Webinar from Scrumdotorg which was presented by rjocham – two great profiles to follow on Twitter.
Ralph Jocham showed a slide in which we could see that 5 of the top 7 main reasons for failed Agile Projects – in some perspective – are related a change in the company culture.
The main reason is that 46% of people believe that the Company philosophy or culture is at odd with core agile values.
Other reasons are:
– 38% cite lack of management support
– 38% lack of support for cultural transition
– 36% external pressure to follow traditional waterfall process – I have added this one because I think this is a kind of culture changing resistance.
– 34% ineffective management collaboration
Considering these data and knowing how much we as a human race are resistant to change, it is not too difficult to understand the reason for so many agile projects failures.
In the video Agile Product Ownership in a nutshell one of the phrases in the video says that:
If your organization doesn’t like truth and honesty, probably won’t like Agile.
To sum up: According to this survey, a huge portion of Agile projects fails because the company board does not support and/or is not committed to change the company culture.
Below I left you the original slide, the Webinar and the link to access it on Scrum.org.
SLIDE ORIGINAL:
