In connection with the Danish Agile@Scale Day 2017 organized by Accenture and #AgilityLab, #AgilityLab invited for a spot check of the temperature of agile in Denmark 2017.
A total of 142 people responded to 3 simple questions:
- (Belief) Do you believe in agile?
- (Experience) How well is agile working for you right now at work?
- (Size) How large is the project/program/… you are working in?
Not surprisingly most of our respondents have a high belief in agile. On a scale from 1-10, with 10 being the best, the average is 8.7.
Numerically there is a gap between the belief in agile and what is actually experienced in projects/programs etc. The average experienced is 6.3.
Based on the responses, the degree of belief in agile or how agile is experienced at work do not change significantly with size.
Looking at the numeric gap between belief end experience, 75% of respondents has a higher belief than what can be matched by their experience, 20% are in balance and 5% has a numerically lower belief than their experience.
We also asked if there is a Danish company that had impressed the respondents and got a list of 19 companies and a number of reasons why respondents have been impressed. The most often mentioned companies are SimCorp, DFDS, TrustPilot and Bankdata.
As bonus material – we came across another survey just published by Alex Yakyma, OrgMindset.com. Among the largest impediments to agile transformations the top four of what seem to be holding us back are:
- The way management thinks and acts (Culture/organization)
- The way money flows (Funding)
- The way work flows (Planning)
- The way we treat people (HR)
This is interesting and provides an unexpected new dimension to the temperature check, even if the bonus material is not constrained to Denmark.
Potentially over-concluding from the bonus material, agile itself is not the worst enemy of agile. The largest impediments come from management and how money, plans and people are managed.
In summary, our belief in agile is high, with a noticeable gap to what we experience in our project or program.
In a potential future temperature check it would be interesting to investigate what causes this gap including the aspects brought in by the bonus material.
Link to the summary in dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/eyws4s4731qjyf0/Temperature%20of%20agile%20in%20Denmark%202017%20v1.0%2005-Sep-2017.pdf?dl=0