Agility in a Traditional World

Ever felt your agile aspirations were butting heads with traditional management? Yeah, thought so! Sarah Benjamin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-benjamin-4586234a/) has certainly seen the effects of these two world views colliding and has kindly offered to share her views. Thanks Sarah!

In recent times, software and product development have seen radical shifts in approach that signal a clear shift away from more conventional, plan driven methods such as Waterfall.

It seeks to engage more closely and collaboratively with the work than ever before, encouraging innovation and creativity and looking to build solutions in iterations, enabling development to happen live with methods such as Agile.

Some organisations attribute their success to Agile. But in (many) others it has experienced multiple problems and in some cases large scale failure. In many organisations, it has become limited in its capability, often butting heads with the rest of the organisation.

So what makes one organisation so different from another? What are the common problems experienced, and why are they so common?

To understand this, we need to examine the basis of “modern management”. Only then can we understand why these commonalities exist and what is required to redress them to allow innovation, creativity and learning to truly thrive.