Last week, I had the great honor of moderating the L.A. stop on the Rally Success Tour. Thank you to those of you who were among the 72 attendees (standing room only!). We had great interactions in all parts of the event. Our guest speaker, Dr. Israel Gat, as well as our four panelists Chris Babcock, Christophe Louvion, Laureen Knudsen, and David Annis took us through various aspects of their Agile journeys.  As moderator, I had a great vantage point from which to take it all in.

Probably what excited me the most were the breakout sessions that followed the Panel Discussion style Executive Roundtable. The energy in the room was electric! In particular, Christophe Louvion drew quite a crowd to discuss “101 Things Leaders do that Kill Team Productivity & What to do about it”.   The breakout session format really brought out the group wisdom based on each attendee’s own experiences as well as reactions to what Christophe had experienced.

Christophe’s topic and readout from the breakout group led me to think about what I have seen as Agile Adoption Failure Modes. I’ve captured 12 of these throughout my own experiences with teams and organizations, 89 less than Christophe, but who’s counting?
Here are my top 12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes:

1.    “Checkbook commitments” from executive management
2.    A culture that does not support learning
3.    Ineffective use of the retrospective
4.    Failure to pay attention to the infrastructure required
5.    Inability to get everyone in the planning meetings
6.    Unavailable product owner, or too many product owners who can’t agree
7.    Bad ScrumMasters
8.    Not having an onsite evangelist for remote locations
9.    Teams lacking authority and decision-making ability
10.    Not pulling Testing forward into Definition of “Done”
11.    Continuing to rely on a traditional performance appraisal system
12.    Reverting to form, embracing the evil we know

As you either start your Agile Adoption or continually inspect and adapt your path, check-in with your team and your organization about any of these modes. If any of the failure modes exist, stop now. Create a fix for it. Declare the action and owner of the action for the fix. Set a date for when the action will be completed. Inspect and adapt the fix. Repeat and rinse.
Have any of these Failure Modes torpedoed your Agile adoption? Please share your experiences and any strategies you recommend for avoiding these pitfalls. Or, start a new discussion on topics you’d like to discuss further. Together we can use this community to drive new innovation that enables us all to realize the benefits of Agile.

To learn more about some of my thoughts on Agile and Lean adoption, browse my posts on www.rallydev.com/agileblog.  And thanks again for attending!