T3CON Recap - How to Fail Your Agile Transformation Successfully
Why Agile Transformations Fail and Succeed
Picture this: your company embarks on an agile transformation project. Managers anticipate better products, higher productivity, stronger better adherence to project timelines and budgets. You do everything by the book — implementing sprints, retrospectives, appointing a Scrum master — yet none of it delivers the amazing results you expected. You hear your colleagues start to say, “Agile just doesn’t work for us.”
Marc Löffler has been working with agile methods such as Scrum, Kanban and eXtreme Programming since 2005. Over the years, he has identified key reasons why agile transformations fail. More often than not, the issue isn’t how well you implement agile frameworks — it’s about your company’s vision, purpose, and people. At T3CON24, in a keynote titled "How to fail your agile transformation successfully", Löffler shared with us the most common obstacles to agile success — and how to overcome them.
Marc Löffler
Marc Löffler is a keynote speaker, author and mentor for passionate Scrum Masters. He has been passionately involved with agile methods such as Scrum, Kanban and eXtreme Programming since 2005. Before promoting agile, he successfully managed multinational projects as a certified project manager (IPMA) at companies such as Volkswagen, Siemens and EADS.
Defining agile, and understanding agile challenges
Löffler opened his talk by asking the audience who was currently working in agile—many hands went up. Then he followed with: How many of you feel you’re working successfully in agile? Most hands went down.
Löffler pointed out several key misunderstandings about agile that contribute to this lack of confidence. One common misconception is the confusion between Scrum and agile—many assume they are synonymous, but Scrum is just one approach within agile. If Scrum hasn’t worked for your team, that doesn’t mean other agile methods won’t be beneficial.
“If I have to phrase it in one sentence, I would define agile as shortening the feedback loop,” Löffler shared. Whether you’re thinking in terms of external feedback on products and services, or internal feedback within and between teams, agile is about gaining insights into how well work is being done. “The other term I use quite often is, getting better,” Löffler continued. “When you as a person, a team, or a company are constantly getting better, constantly challenging yourself, and asking how to improve your processes, that’s agile.”
Löffler shared that around 80% of the companies he works with who say they’re working in agile are actually working in “fake agile”. He likened such companies to people putting paint on rusted iron— it might look better superficially, but it’s not addressing the underlying issues. “When you look at such companies, the ways they are working are more or less the same,” he said. “They have a framework they call agile or Scrum, but nothing’s actually changing or improving”. So, what mistakes are these companies making that are preventing them from seeing the real benefits of agile methodologies?
Before diving into the key mistakes, Löffler cautioned that successful agile takes time. He used his saxophone onstage to provide an example of this. He walked the audience through a story about going to a concert, seeing an amazing saxophone solo, and being inspired to spend 5,000 euro on a state-of-the-art sax. “Then you pick it up,” he said, blowing into his saxophone and making a deliberately tuneless noise. “It seems to be broken, right? So we view it as rubbish, and throw it in a corner. But everyone knows if I want to truly learn to play an instrument, it takes some time.” So it is with agile transformations: successful implementation involves training, practice, and patience.
Agile transformation mistake 1: Agile for agile’s sake
One of the main mistakes Löffler sees is people using agile for the wrong reasons. They’re looking to incorporate agile because their competitors are doing it or because it’s attractive to new employees. If you want your agile transformation to succeed, you need a clear, tangible benefit you’re aiming to achieve.
Some companies set broad goals, like speeding up processes or increasing profit margins. Löffler warns against this kind of vague ambition. “Effectiveness is much more important than efficiency,” he said. He shared an example of a client in the medical sector who wanted to accelerate their processes. They already had 15 products on the market, but as the CEO admitted to Löffler, only three were actually selling. There’s no point in making the wrong products faster—setting the right goals is crucial.
Before starting your agile transformation, the most important questions to ask are: What is your purpose? What concrete problems are you trying to solve? What’s the biggest challenge you need to overcome?
Agile transformation mistake 2: Lack of clear vision
The second mistake many companies make in their agile transformations is lacking a clear and communicable company vision. Here, Löffler defines the vision as where you want your company to go in the next 3-5 years, and the mission as the steps you’ll take to get there.
He shared an example of a company he worked with that claimed to have a vision—but when he asked to hear it, they pulled up a 15-sentence paragraph from their website. No one is going to remember the specifics of such a lengthy statement. You need a concise, big-picture destination. “A great vision is the kind where if I woke your employees up at 3 in the morning, they could instantly tell me what it is,” Löffler said.
A great vision must also be customer-focused. A clear destination is useless if it leads to products and services that have no market. Löffler recalled working for a company that spent over 200 million euros developing a radically small and portable projector—only to find that no one bought it. The projector didn’t support full HD resolution, and prospective customers weren’t willing to sacrifice image quality for portability. It’s important to make sure your vision satisfies a genuine demand.
To refine your organization’s precise vision, Löffler recommended answering the following questions:
- Who is your customer?
- What is your customer’s paint point?
- What is your solution, and what makes it unique?
- What are the top three key features?
Taking the time to define your vision ensures your agile transformation supports the right work—rather than helping you do the wrong work faster.
Agile transformation mistake 3: Siloes
To illustrate the problem with silos, Löffler once again turned to his saxophone. He got two volunteers from the audience— one who was dubbed the expert in saxophone holding, the other as the expert in saxophone button pressing. But when Löffler and his two experts tried to play the saxophone together, the result was pure discord. Then, Löffler adjusted how the volunteers held the saxophone, and which buttons they pressed — and this time, the saxophone played beautifully. He likened the first attempt to a team of specialists working in their own knowledge siloes, and the second to a cross-functional team.
But lack of harmony is not the only risk posed by siloes. Employee turnover is a fact of life, but when each of these employees holds business-critical information, you’re losing more than just one employee each time someone moves on.
To break down silos and retain expertise, Löffler recommended cross-functional teams: teams composed of people from different domains and knowledge fields, working together toward a shared vision. For developers specifically, he suggested practices like pair programming and mob programming to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Agile transformation mistake 4: Employees first
The fourth major cause of agile project failure, Löffler explained, is prioritizing what employees are already doing over what customers actually need. Creating a fun and positive work environment is important, but not at the expense of delivering products and services that truly excite customers. This kind of misplaced focus, he said, leads to “zombies”: employees who mindlessly repeat the same tasks without thinking critically about improving processes or adding value for customers.
To combat zombie-ism, cultivate psychological safety. Psychological safety means creating work environments where employees feel free to try new things, take risks, surface concerns and give honest feedback, without fear of disproportionate recrimination. Ultimately, you don’t want your employees to be blindly following work processes they know are broken, because they’re afraid to speak up— you want an environment where people are comfortable pointing out inefficiencies, and taking bold new strategies to rectify them.
Building Agile Success with the Right Ingredients
Löffler emphasized that each company is unique—different teams, different people, different processes. This means that each company’s shortcomings will be a little different, and so will the solutions needed to address them. Löffler used the metaphor of a fridge to describe how companies should best tailor their approach. Some ingredients—your “fresh” ones—represent what’s already working well. Others are “staples”—not necessarily exciting or innovative, but still valuable. And then, there’s the old produce—or even mold—that needs to be cleared out for an agile transformation to succeed.
When it comes to having a clear vision, a strong case for agile, effective knowledge exchange, and high psychological safety, every organization will have strengths that are ready to build on and weaknesses that need replacing. The key is identifying your unique mix of ingredients and leveraging your strengths to tackle the challenges ahead.
Did you enjoy this recap? If you would like to relive all the exciting moments from T3CON24, be sure to check our our recap of the entire conference!
