Discover your inner agile Jedi - findings from Unleash Amsterdam

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For the very first time in our young company history, we were one of the sponsoring partners of a big Atlassian event. “We” are Axians, Atlassian Solution Partner with headquarters in Belgium and winner of the 2021 Atlassian Partner of the Year - Rising Star award. The event was Unleash, Atlassian’s conference on all the things agile and DevOps, held in Amsterdam last week.

With about 1.200 present at the beautiful Beurs van Berlage, it would have been hard not to meet the most inspiring people and have the most interesting conversations. With Compass and Atlassian Intelligence now being generally available, Jira Product Discovery going bonkers and more and more insights making their way into the Atlassian product suite, there was plenty of product news for conference attendees.

Furthermore, building a successful team - or by extension a successful company - requires the right magic mix of people, practices and tools. And so we brought along a survey to measure the agile maturity ánd most common challenges Unleash attendees experience today. We are very grateful for the many people who participated and gave us very valuable results.

In this article, we are happy to share some of our first, high level findings.

Our Approach

Assumptions about the audience

Being at an agile / DevOps event, we were expecting a higher level of agile maturity compared to the overall global economy.

This seems to be the case, as every single respondent said they are using a form of agile methodology within their organization:

More than 50% has developed a personal flavour of agile, which usually is a mix of scrum and kanban. From the segment using a team framework by the book, nearly 30% claim to be using kanban; Only 7% report to be using traditional scrum. And a cool side note: not a single respondent said they were not using agile practices in their company. Cheers to the entire audience at unleash !

We also expected a fairly high maturity in software teams, but were curious how agile practices also make their way into IT and business teams.

And so our survey had questions about both the team and organizational levels of agility. An impressive 75% said they are already bridging the gap between software and IT teams. At the same time, bringing business teams aboard the agile ship remains challenging, even today. Only 1 out of 4 respondents claim to have them on board as well.

Finally, as the conference agenda was full of interesting sessions and the expo floor full of awesome people to talk to, we expected people to have limited time for surveys.

Because of that, we tried to find the balance: ask enough questions to collect valuable information and keep it short enough for people to get to the end of it.

About the survey

We hit the ground running with 4 main goals in mind:

• Allow people to rate themselves against a broader audience (Unleash attendees), with a pleasant twist;

• Get an overall view on agile maturity across the conference attendees;

• Find out what agile practitioners at the conference see as their biggest challenges for teamwork;

• And, similarly, what they think should improve when scaling agile to the company or business level.

To add a bit of fun, respondents will receive their agile Jedi rank early next year. Based on their scores, they can proudly identify themselves with one of these characters:

These results are personal, so we won’t be sharing them publicly. Of course, bragging rights are entirely open for people who participated in the survey and can’t withstand the urge to share …

Overall results

Team Agility

As Unleash is a conference targeted at people with an appetite for agile and devops culture and practices, we expected to see fairly high scores from the survey. And while that was true, it was interesting to notice that certain areas - even for more experienced still are challenging.

Respondents clearly state that their agile team is pretty happy in general. The highest scores they give themselves, are for autonomy, agile skills and the tools they use to support their work. Assuming that most people at Unleash are using or at least considering Atlassian, high satisfaction about tools is obviously pleasant feedback!

While still very much above average, our survey shows that teams still feel they can improve on tracking their progress and on predictability. In practice, these domains are linked very closely: It is essential to understand where your bottlenecks and pain points are to improve that predictability.

The most significant signal we picked up from our survey, is that teams see prioritizing work as their biggest challenge. This is a clear hint that deciding on the right things to build and bringing product management teams, practices and tools into the picture is very welcome indeed!

 Top Team Challenges

While some teams did mention that some of their internal team tools and practices can be improved, we carefully assume that this is a normal part of adopting practices step by step.

Some of them even said that they want to improve their velocity. In its strictest sense, we would usually advise people to handle velocity with care as a metric (and even more so as a target), but people also mentioned their deployment frequency and the overall speed to get features and fixes to their customers at the same time. In that sense, making feedback loops shorter is definitely worth aspiring.

When we look at the top 5 items on the list, it seems fair to say that things become much harder as we scale. While there is an overall sense of satisfaction and confidence in the own team, interactions with other teams and a lack of visibility on the bigger goals is a frequently mentioned area of concern. While it may seem easy at first to point the finger at the other folks, breaking down siloes between teams is an item that many organizations - big and small - are struggling with.

Other strong contenders in the improvement area are capacity planning and automation. Capacity planning is very often a synonym with resource planning. And even more specifically, dealing with scarcity of skilled resources across multiple projects in an organization. Different types of work require a different approach, different tools and maybe even a different mindset. Automation is about saving time on repetitive, low value manual work throughout the process. With the fast arrival and integration of AI, possibilities to automate stuff we couldn’t imagine only a few months ago may be just around the corner.

Top organization challenges

In a similar fashion, we also asked respondents what they considered as the biggest challenges in their organization. Or, in other words, what makes it hard to work together across teams at your organization.

While our respondents are very positive about their own team and its agile practices, many indicate that working together with other teams is hard.

Dependencies between different teams' work are often not visible (enough). In many cases, the lack of integrated tooling is named as one of the most important reasons for that. We like to add that it is also quite common that organizations don’t invest enough in collaboration and communication between teams that simply need each other to deliver the best outcomes.

A significant third at company level, is that not everyone seems to get the proper training / education to apply agile practices properly. We believe there is a world of opportunity - still - to help business teams discover the benefits of an agile and DevOps culture.

Conclusions

We are very pleased with the outcomes of our survey. As our company mission is to “deliver the best of ICT, with a human touch“, we see that we can deliver a valuable contribution to companies that want to get more from their agile transformation. Beyond practices and tools, we also see that Atlassian investments are going into areas where it matters most: breaking down siloes, bringing more insights into the products, automating cross-team flows and making it easier to build the right things. In short, the future looks bright!

May the force be with you on your agile journey. We’re happy to help!

Call to action

As I mentioned a couple of times, we are aware that the audience at Unleash was - very likely - very skilled at agile and devops. I wouldn’t dare suggest that people out here are not, but it would be great if you would also participate and discover your agile Jedi rank. Not only will you receive your personal result (compared with the overall average responses), but you will help us even further consolidate and refine the survey results.

To participate, you can complete the survey online via this link: Fill out the online survey. We are keeping the survey open until January 12th, 2024 and plan to process the results the week after.

Eternal gratitude, as well as your personal Jedi character will be yours!