Enterprise leaders serious about development quality need to stop paying lip service to agile

We are compiling our Agile Software Development Top 10 report, which rates service providers’ capabilities at delivering their clients’ agile dreams. As HFS conducts reference calls with executives leading agile change programs, the primary message is that until the business is aligned to agile, the main benefits will not happen. So, service providers must find ways to engage across the organizations they are transforming and manage both organizational changes and agile operations.

The agile magic only comes true when you fully embrace it

The only way to understand which service providers are truly delivering in a space is to ask their clients, which is what we do during the Top 10 process through a series of reference calls and calls to our network. One of the main themes we detected from the beginning of this process is how important each client’s attitude is to the success of the process. One large distribution company we spoke with explained, “The agile experiment had been failing for three years; we tried it with a couple of providers, and we couldn’t get it to work. said ‘It’s you; before we take this on, we need you to commit to the following.’ And that worked, the senior management sponsor was forced to step up and help drive change. It worked.”

Without the right leadership, enough of the followers don’t embrace agile. And “embrace” is the right word; “accepting” agile isn’t enough to drive success. We heard a familiar story from a global car manufacturer who made the point, “Until everyone gets it, agile will only give you an incremental change, not the big step change you were promised.” They further pointed out that the people expecting the big impact were often responsible for not helping to drive the change required.

Talent is key to enabling agile—this is what buyers prize

So, what else are customers looking for from service providers? The key thing, and fairly obviously, given that this is about delivering agile development services, is talent. But not just talent—flexibility, the right people, at the right time, and in the right place, are crucial. This means having a broad and deep pool of talent to draw upon across locations so that you can begin an engagement with the right set of skills. Part of the challenge of agile development that makes it different from traditional coding is the need for people with broader than usual skillsets. Coders need to have some DevOps skills and potentially some security knowledge to be versatile and effective. It’s incredibly important to keep track of your people’s skills and to pick the right people in the first place.

An important question for potential service providers is about how they track and develop skills within their workforce. Do they have competency frameworks for each staff member that show expertise across technical, project and delivery, and behavioral areas? Do they have a learning program structured to boost these skills, and do they have methods for fast-tracking people into the agile world?

The talent the provider brings must be able to push back

One of the advantages of using offshore service providers has been their overriding flexibility, willingness to go the extra mile, and ability to commit resources to get the job done, satisfying (at least some) additional customer requirements without referring to the contract for additional payments. This flexibility has traditionally come at a cost—a lack of ingenuity and push back—a “Well, this is what you asked for” mentality where changes were made blindly on the whim of a customer, in some cases to the detriment of the overall project taken in the round.

“Our partnership works because there’s some give and take. Over the years, we’ve made sure they are comfortable pushing back on us if we’re not on the right path, and vice versa.”

—Anonymized client reference

For agile projects to be successful is vital to make sure that all levels of staff are empowered to stand up in meetings and push back when it is necessary to do so. While this is not a problem within senior people within service providers, to get a true picture of this characteristic, you need to speak with developers and see if they can communicate concerns and push back when needed. Again, one of the executives from a large telco said, “Too often, the team just do as they’re told, when they should really push back—which is a big challenge we need to tackle.”

The Bottom Line: Without organizational change management driven from the top, you won’t get the full benefits of agile.

The most common advice we received from the references about adopting agile was to visit references and ask the teams in action questions. This is the best way to see agile in practice and to see how the service provider has helped overcome any organizational barriers and how well the teams integrate into the business. Hopefully, this will provide a close-up view of what success looks like.

Push the potential service providers and see if they push back. Agile, more than any other engagement, requires an honest relationship, and if you can’t see that happening before the deal is signed, it probably won’t happen.