Management Challenges to Implementing Agile Processes in Traditional Development Organizations

TLDR

Discussions with traditional developers and managers reveal contradictory views on agile, noting it is less burdensome on small projects yet managers encounter real and perceived barriers when attempting to adopt it in larger organizations. The authors classified barriers to agile adoption into scope/scale‑specific problems and broader, general issues requiring resolution. They identified development process conflicts, business process conflicts, and people conflicts as the key challenges for managers in large organizations adopting agile.

Abstract

Discussions with traditional developers and managers concerning agile software development practices nearly always contain two somewhat contradictory ideas. They find that on small, stand-alone projects, agile practices are less burdensome and more in tune with the software industry's increasing needs for rapid development and coping with continuous change. Managers face several barriers, real and perceived, when they try to bring agile approaches into traditional organizations. They categorized the barriers either as problems only in terms of scope or scale, or as significant general issues needing resolution. From these two categories, we've identified three areas - development process conflicts, business process conflicts, and people conflicts - that we believe are the critical challenges to software managers of large organizations in bringing agile approaches to bear in their projects.