Time and the management’s involvement are the main factors of successful implementation of agile practices in Russian companies.
The Russian coaching company ScrumTrek has shared the results of its study at the 2018 Agile Business Conference. The leadership’s policy is especially important and fundamental during the launch of pilot projects during the first year of introducing agile principles in the company, they reported. Unlike last year, this study focused on how successful the agile transformation is. Apparently, far from all the goals the companies hope to achieve at the beginning of their journey are actually met.
IT companies seem to achieve their agile transformation goals more confidently than others. They have attained almost all their targets, including increasing the transparency of the processes, making them more predictable, bringing change under control and eventually accelerating new products development.
Telecom companies appear to have it hardest – the gap between their goals and achievements is most prominent in this industry. They fail to accelerate launching products, suffer a decline in labor productivity, and rarely achieve coherence between business and IT. In the financial sector, the consistency of business and IT is the key goal that is being successfully achieved. Interestingly, with telecom companies, senior executives’ involvement in the agile transformation is far lower compared with other industries. At the same time, employees’ motivation soars unfailingly and unexpectedly in all industries. Over the past year, the involvement of middle management in large companies in Russia increased by 466% compared with the 2017 agile study.
The biggest disappointment for companies introducing the new business practices was their inability to achieve the intended improvement in product quality, ScrumTrek reports. In all industries, the result was 20-30% below the expectations. Furthermore, this transformation takes time – it takes most companies at least three years, while the pilot phase alone takes at least a year.