The 14th Annual State of Agile Report is Here

Is your organization practicing or scaling enterprise Agile? The State of Agile report provides the world’s most comprehensive data for benchmarking your Agile practice and planning your next wave of expansion.

The 14th annual State of Agile report is based on the experiences of 1,100 IT and business professionals from around the globe. Since its inception, 40,000 Agile executives, practitioners, and consultants worldwide have shared their insights, making the State of Agile report the largest and longest running report of its kind. Read on for some key findings from this year’s research.

Culture is still a thing

The highest-ranked challenges to adopting and scaling Agile continue to be related to organizational culture. General organizational resistance to change, inadequate management support and sponsorship, and organizational culture at odds with Agile values remain in the top 5 challenges. A new choice this year, not enough leadership participation, also ranked in the top 5.

Distributed Agile teams – a new normal

While working face-to-face can be desirable for Agile practices, survey respondents indicated that organizations are supporting distributed teams and team members. There is no evidence of a trend toward increased co-location, as more respondents indicated their organizations continue to support and encourage team collaboration across geographic boundaries and timezones. The current worldwide health crisis may prove to be an inflection point that leads to an additional increase in distributed teams as a “new normal.”

SAFe® is the scaling framework of choice…again!

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) continues to be the most popular scaling method cited by respondents, increasing by 5% over last year and outpacing the number two choice, Scrum@Scale, by 19%.

“We are proud that SAFe® continues to be the most popular, effective scaling method on the market. Since the earliest days at Scaled Agile, our core belief has been simple: better software and systems make the world a better place. What has emerged during this global pandemic is confirmation that — given the right environment — remote Agile teams can be highly productive, and enterprises continue to get outstanding business benefits from applying SAFe®.”

– Dean Leffingwell, Creator of SAFe® and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile Inc.

Value Stream Management adoption

Value Stream Management (VSM) is a combination of people, process, and technology that maps, optimizes, visualizes, measures, and governs business value flow (in the form of epics, stories, work items) through heterogeneous enterprise software delivery pipelines from idea through development and into production. 78% of the respondents said that their organizations have interest in VSM, are planning to implement VSM, or are currently in some stage of VSM implementation.

With these responses, we expect a greater percentage of organizations to embrace VSM going forward, as understanding increases and tooling more capably enables the unification of the “concept to cash” value stream.

What does the future hold?

Overall, the survey results indicate that agility is still largely confined to development, IT, and operations. However, the notion that business agility requires effective alignment and coordination across all areas of an organization continues to gain momentum. Next year, we expect to see organizations report greater expansion of agility into areas beyond those typically associated with building, deploying, and maintaining software.

When Agile is scaled across an organization, everyone experiences the benefits.

Read the full report here