Why Agile Fails in Some Tech Organizations

Scrum as a Service: When Agile Teams Become Ticket Processors Scrum as a Service is when Agile teams are execution units, taking orders instead of owning value delivery. They don’t solve problems; or shaping the product, they just code and close Jira issues. It’s what happens when companies adopt Scrum mechanically but keep traditional thinking and control structures intact. Symptoms of Scrum as a Service 1) No Product Ownership The PO is a backlog manager, not a decision-maker. Teams can’t challenge priorities. The backlog is a job assignment queue. Sprint Planning is a scheduling exercise, not a conversation about functional or technical trade-offs. 2) No Cross-Discipline Collaboration UX, DevOps, and Security exist outside the team, creating slow handoffs. Developers get fully fleshed-out requirements, not problems to solve. Agile teams are ticket processors, not value creators. 3) Nothing Changes Daily Scrums become status meetings for managers. Retros don’t lead to improvements, just performance reviews. Teams are judged by team outputs like velocity, not business outcomes. How This Happens 1) No Organizational Change Leadership keeps command and control, just renaming old roles. 2) Waterfall Thinking Teams have fixed scope and deadlines, no room for continuous discovery or progressive elaboration. 3) POs as Middlemen, Not Leaders POs relay stakeholder demands instead of shaping product strategy. 4) SMs are Managers. Not Coaches SMs push teams to move faster rather than helping them achieve a sustainable pace. How to Fix It 1) Give Teams Ownership Let teams define and prioritize their backlog. Facilitate direct feedback loops with users, not just stakeholder requests. Make POs strategic leaders, not order-takers. 2) Tear Down Silos Embed UX, DevOps, QA, and Security into the Scrum team. Stop treating devs as coders for hire. Make them coequal partners in product thinking. 3) Shift to Outcome Metrics Stop measuring success by velocity, throughput, or tickets. Track customer impact, retention, usability, and product adoption. Ask: Are we solving problems or just releasing code? 4) Decentralize Decision-Making Replace top-down roadmaps with team-driven prioritization. Let teams influence scope, trade-offs, and release planning. Encourage teams to experiment and innovate. 5) Foster Continuous Improvement Make retros actionable. Give teams time for technical excellence, like refactoring, automation, and innovation. Shift from feature delivery to sustainable, high-quality product development. From Execution Teams to Product Teams Scrum teams should be value creators, not feature factories. Agile is meant to empower teams, not turn them into Jira clerks. If teams can’t challenge priorities, shape solutions, adjust processes, or innovate, then you don’t have Agile. You have Scrum as a Service. Does your organization trust teams to own the product? If not, Scrum isn’t the problem. Your structure is.

Agile is dead. I’ll wait while you process that. Here’s the deal: Agile didn’t die because the idea was bad—it died because we killed it. Let’s break it down. 1️⃣ The Checklist Mentality: Agile started as a revolution in thinking but got buried under its own rituals. Daily standups? Backlogs? Sprints? They’ve become corporate theater. It’s not about outcomes anymore, it’s about checking boxes. Agile was supposed to be adaptable. Now it’s just as rigid as the systems it was designed to disrupt. 2️⃣ Scaling Without Soul: Frameworks like SAFe slapped a “scale” sticker on Agile without addressing toxic work cultures. What’s left? More bureaucracy, less agility. Scaling a broken system doesn’t fix it, it amplifies the dysfunction. 3️⃣ Speed ≠ Value: Agile promised faster results, but we’ve confused speed with success. Delivering something fast is useless if it doesn’t make an impact or add value. Agile became a race to nowhere, a hamster wheel of meaningless output. 4️⃣ Leadership Didn’t Get It: Let’s be honest—most leaders never truly bought into Agile contrary to their cheerleading behind it. For old-school executives it’s impossible for them to let go of control, and Agile demands exactly that. Without leadership trust, Agile was destined to fail. 5️⃣ Consulting Snake Oil: As they are famous for doing, consultants turned Agile into a product and sold it like magic beans. They pitched it as the answer to everything, but it wasn’t designed to fix bad leadership or broken teams. Agile isn’t Change Management 2.0, and you failed miserably if you tried to implement it as such. 6️⃣ The Human Cost: Agile became synonymous with “do more, faster.” Guess what? That’s not sustainable. Teams burned out. Engagement dropped. People became Agile collateral damage. The Harsh Truth: Agile didn’t fail; we failed Agile. We ignored its heart, culture, collaboration, trust and turned it into a system for systems’ sake. Here’s a radical idea: forget Agile. Forget the buzzwords. Forget the frameworks. Start with your people. Ask the uncomfortable questions. And lead with empathy. Real transformation doesn’t come from processes or tools. It comes from people who feel heard, valued, and empowered. Agile is dead. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Some company cultures are just not compatible with Agile. They treat Agile as a process that can be implemented, rather than a change in mindsets, behaviors, and most of all, values of the people doing the work. Someone up top has decided that we’d better implement this Agile thing. The PMO is assigned to “go figure it out” and come back with a plan. A few months later, Agile processes are feeling heavily bureaucratic or like a bunch of checkbox exercises. There is confusion about roles and responsibilities, and things are getting messy. The problem is that you're struggling to adopt Agile methodologies at the values-level, making it feel more like a set of rules to follow rather than a different way of working altogether. It’s like your company starts up an employee baseball tournament. Only, you’re not allowed to go outside. You have to play in one of the big conference rooms. Oh, and you have to use whatever equipment you find in the supply room. The solution is to start with the values and principles behind Agile first, not the processes. The fundamental values of Agile are often in direct opposition to the established culture of the company. But by addressing the cultural blockers up front, you’ll be more likely to move toward Agile ways of working. 1) Self-organizing teams. The team is the primary unit of an Agile approach, not the individual. Decisions are often made collectively. People can switch roles or overlap without needing any permission or supervision from outside the team. The rigid culture around role definition, incentive and reward structures, and decision making will all need to be modified FIRST before you can support self-organizing teams. 2) Building in smaller increments. Teams cannot know in advance everything they need to know in order to build a working complex system, which most products and applications are. Instead, they need to start with a rough idea that includes a vision, some clear objectives, and some general constraints. Executives attempt to exert a high degree of control over everything before embarking on a project that is large and complex. Leaders will need to change the way they think about planning and funding projects to be able to adapt to Agile ways of working. 3) Adapting to change. The heart of Agile approaches is the acceptance of unknowns, and the ability to change direction based on new information coming in as we go. This is another hard pill to swallow for rigid corporate cultures. Planning has been an important part of company cultures since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and old habits die hard. Executives need to get more comfortable with embracing flexibility rather than adhering to a plan. We work with leaders to help them understand, appreciate, and adopt the changes of mindset, culture, and values necessary before or during big transformations. If you're stuck in the middle of a messy Agile rollout, give me a ping and we'll talk.

One of the most frustrating experiences as a Scrum Master or even Agile Project Manager is …… …..realizing that the real obstacle to agility isn’t your team. It’s sometimes the system around them. I’ve seen teams go through all the motions: - Sprint planning. ✔️ - Standups. ✔️ - Retrospectives. ✔️ But when you listen closely, you realize something’s off. People are complying, not collaborating. They’re estimating to please, not to plan. They’re adapting the backlog, but not the mindset. This happens when Agile is adopted as a process but not understood as a #value system. Because here’s the hard truth: →You can’t prioritize “Individuals and interactions” in a culture where people are afraid to speak. →You can’t “Respond to change” in a system that punishes deviation. →You can’t “Collaborate with customers” when success is defined by scope and speed, not outcome. And when that gap exists, it always trickles down straight to the project level. Suddenly: You’re delivering “on time” but solving the wrong problems. You’re releasing fast, but nobody’s sure what changed for the user. Teams are “productive” but disengaged. You become the bridge constantly interpreting Agile values for a system that still speaks the language of control and certainty. So what do you do as the team leader? - You stop pushing frameworks and start inviting conversations. - You make retrospectives about honesty, not optics. - You remind your stakeholders that change isn’t the enemy and rigidity is. - And you protect your team’s ability to think, not just deliver. Because in the end, Agile isn’t a method to manage work. 📌 It’s a belief about how humans solve problems together. And if that belief isn’t shared across the system, you’ll keep running sprints in circles. In your experience, what breaks first? Agile processes or Agile values

What if I told you that Agile doesn’t fail because teams can’t deliver It fails because leadership never truly bought in? If you're a Scrum Master or Agile Coach, this is the hill your career lives or dies on. Here’s a scenario that comes up often You're in an interview and someone asks: “What do you do when leadership isn’t on board with Agile?” Most people will respond with: “I explain Agile values... I try to educate them... I run workshops...” And that’s where they lose the room. Because leadership doesn’t respond to lectures. They respond to leverage. To outcomes. To business results. In reality, leadership resists Agile because: It looks like process overhead, not business impact. It clashes with the top-down habits they've spent decades mastering. They’ve seen Agile done badly—and once burned, twice shy. They're chasing quarterly metrics, not transformation roadmaps. So how do you shift the tide? You don’t push Agile—you pull outcomes into the spotlight. ✅ Frame Agile in business terms—Talk faster delivery, better customer retention, improved predictability. ✅ Run a small test—Take a pilot team, solve a real problem, and quantify the impact. ✅ Speak with numbers—Don’t say “Agile helped.” Say “Customer turnaround time dropped by 30% in 3 sprints.” Here’s the truth: Leadership doesn't need a mindset shift. They need to see something work—and then they’ll follow the signal. If you're in the middle of an Agile resistance story, you're not stuck. You're just one measurable win away from buy-in.

Agile was supposed to make everything better. Slower delivery? Agile will fix it. Rigid processes? Just add a Scrum Master. Too expensive? Don’t worry, "self-organizing teams" will handle it. We’ve been hearing the same pitch for over 20 years. Stand-ups, sprints, sticky notes, retrospectives and a flood of buzzwords like "fail fast", "iterate" and "MVP". But here’s what nobody wants to talk about -->Agile didn’t fix everything. In fact, it created new problems. And somewhere along the way, someone started making a whole lot of money while the rest of us were told to stay quiet and "trust the process." The moment you question it, the Agile gatekeepers show up, ready to label you old-fashioned or say "you just don’t get it" or simply blame it on people who can't follow Agile processes. Well, I do get it. I’ve lived it for 20 years. And I’m not here to please anyone, I’m here to speak the truth. Behind the daily ceremonies and Jira dashboards, there’s a different story. Sad story where: a. Testing roles being cut in the name of "efficiency" b. Accountability disappearing because "everyone owns quality" c. QA voices being muted so nobody rocks the sprint d. Chaos being marketed as "experimentation" e. Metrics being gamed just to survive And most people won’t say anything because speaking up can get you in trouble. But I’m not most people. I have no boss over me. No investor telling me what not to say. So I’ll say it, for those who can’t. This article is for anyone who still cares about doing things right. For testers, developers, and leaders who are tired of pretending. For those who still believe quality isn’t optional and who want a better way forward. That’s why I created HIST (Human Intelligence Software Testing). To bring back sanity, structure, and smart thinking into Agile chaos. If you've ever felt like the only one raising your hand while everyone else nods along, this is for you. #HIST #AgileTruths #QARevolution #TestingVoicesMatter #HumanIntelligenceSoftwareTesting