“Up to 46% of startups utilize agile, but despite big talk about agile’s effectiveness, the startup world is filled with failed technology initiatives. We only see the winners, which creates a survivorship bias that seems to equate “agile” with “technology success.” According to the Startup Genome Report Extra on Premature Scaling—co-authored by faculty members at Berkley and Stanford—92% of startups fail within 3 years. Interestingly 74% of those failures came from premature scaling, aka attempting to grow too fast.
Agile can produce amazing results, but it does not offer a sure route to successful technology development and service delivery—and agile’s ability to produce amazing results seems to diminish as a company grows in size.
As organizations grow, their needs change. What works in the early form often does not make sense in their mature structure. Size matters when it comes to choosing the appropriate methodology to meet an organization’s needs. Even though agile may work effectively for a startup, it often works disastrously within a large corporation.
This point—that different contexts demand different solutions—is the key to understanding why IT can’t just adopt agile… and why there might be good reasons why IT has to operate a little slower than IT’s critics would prefer.” – Marc J. Schiller excerpted from his article, “Why IT and Agile Don’t Get Along” at CIOInsight.com, click here to read the article in its entirety. [end]
Insightful and well said! PMO Advisory offers courses throughout the year designed for project professionals interested in Portfolio (PfMP), Program (PgMP), Project (PMP & CAPM) Risk (PMI-RMP) Management, and Agile (PMI-ACP) certifications.
