17th Annual State of Agile Report – Summary & Key Findings
The 17th Annual State of Agile Report presents a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of Agile adoption and transformation within organizations. The report highlights some challenges faced by organizations of different sizes including the need for improved leadership understanding and support, clear priorities and sustained agility. It also emphasizes the critical role of business leaders, executives and individual technical teams in driving Agile transformation. The report further sheds some light on the common complaints about Agile adoption such as leadership, lack of clear direction and business teams’ understanding of Agile. Let’s look at some key statistics from this report.
State of Agile 2024 Report Key Fundings
1. 71% of survey taker organizations use Agile in their software development lifecycle (SDLC).
2. Scrum continues to be the most popular team level methodology with 63% of Agile users are team Scrum.
3. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) remains the top choice at the enterprise level at 26%, but 22% said they don’t follow a mandated enterprise framework at all.
4. Engineering/R&D are the fastest growing adopters of Agile with an increase of 16% over 2022 in terms of Agile implementation.
5. Improved collaboration and better alignment to the business are the top 2 reasons stated by the organizations behind the Agile implementation.
6. Around 43% of respondents states that customer satisfaction was their top priority, while 39% said and 34% said competitive advantage. Product revenue increase, market expansion and customer acquisition are some of the other priorities.
7. Talking about how agile teams evaluate the success of their software development and delivery efforts, 39% rely on individual project metrics to evaluate status and 32% use OKRs linked to epics. Customer surveys, Overall IT metrics, Value Stream KPIs, NPS scores etc are some of the other success measures.
8. While discussing the measurement of performance of their agile teams, 36% of teams are measured on their velocity, 29% states the teams are judged by value delivered and 25% on the sprint burndown report. Predictability (planned to done ratio), Productivity (measured cycle time), Stability (happiness), Deployment frequency, etc are some of the other measures.
9. Around 70% said IT and the software development and delivery teams use Agile, 48% said engineering, product, and R&D teams. Roughly 28% of business operations and 20% of marketing teams have adopted Agile principles.
10. 32% said business leaders and executives are actively leading and participating in company-wide agile transformations, 31% said Agile practices are limited to individual technical teams only and 20% said these are led by the office of the CIO/CTO only.
11. Around 71% of organizations reported using Agile in their SDLC, while 42% said their organizations use a hybrid model that includes Agile, DevOps or other choices.
12. Larger organizations are more likely it is to use a hybrid model, 49% of large companies and 45% of medium-sized companies are doing so. Bigger teams are also more likely to still use Waterfall.
13. When asked specifically about team-level Agile tools, 62% of companies use Atlassian Jira, 32% use Mural/Miro and 25% use either Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project.
Most Common Challenges in Agile Adoption in Organizations
Leadership Understanding and Support: A significant challenge is the lack of understanding and support from leadership with over one-third of respondents citing that their organization’s leadership doesn’t understand Agile and puts up roadblocks, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Lack of Clear Priorities and Direction: Nearly one-third of the respondents mentioned a lack of clear priorities and/or direction as a significant barrier to Agile adoption at the company-wide level.
Business Teams’ Understanding of Agile: Around 29% of the respondents stated that business teams don’t understand Agile and what it can do, posing a challenge to its company-wide adoption.
Past Agile Teams Not Sustaining Agility: Almost 15% of respondents blamed adoption issues on past Agile teams not staying agile, indicating the challenge of maintaining Agile practices over time.
Primary Leaders Driving Agile Transformation within Organizations
Business Leaders and Executives: Approximately one-third of the respondents stated that business leaders and executives are actively leading and participating in company-wide Agile transformations.
Individual Technical Teams: Nearly one-third of the respondents mentioned that individual technical teams are leading the charge to Agile transformation.
CIO/CTOs: Around 20% of the respondents indicated that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are leading Agile transformation within their organizations.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the 17th report highlights Agile’s ongoing changes in organizational ecosystems showing flexibility and driving better results than ever. Although there are still some barriers across large and small organizations with cultural misalignment and leadership participation posing significant challenges. But overall Agile remain a robust framework offering transformative potential when implemented properly by an organization. You can check out the full report here. To learn more about agile methodologies and concepts in project management, check out the PMP training program.