What Kinds of Benefits Do People See When They Go Agile?

VersionOne's "State of Agile" Survey (9th Edition) lists a number of benefits as a result of a transition to Agile including the ability to manage changing priorities, increased team productivity, improved project visibility, increased team morale/motivation, better delivery predictability, enhanced software quality, faster time to market, reduced project risk, and the ability to manage remote teams.

These benefits can be quantified. And although some will argue that “it could have happened in other ways”, the fact remains that these benefits happened as organizations went through an Agile transformation. What those benefits are will depend on what it is that the organization is trying to achieve, the business outcomes. For one organization, the benefits that I have directly experienced through my work with organizations (after the first year of the transition) include:

• Increased visibility and predictability of development projects through common “done”-based reporting.
• Reduction in end-user defects by 50%.
• Employee satisfaction at 78% in the new approach.
• Increased throughput by 1.5X (average, all teams).

Another business (again after the first year of transition) based on their business needs saw:

• Greater than 100% increase in delivered hard benefits
• 28% reduction in unplanned downtime
• 16% reduction in incidents
• Increase capacity available for new development projects as less is being allocated to base work

And more recently we have seen increased overall resilience as, for example, working from home showed no reduction in number of features and stories being delivered.