Dr. Jeff Sutherland: Why 47% of Agile Transformations Fail
Adding people to a late project only makes it later.
Dr. Jeff Sutherland opens with a sobering statistic: 47% of agile transformations fail. Yet 77% of successful agile organizations rely on Scrum — a framework used by some of the most successful companies in the world, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla. The gap between those numbers is where this session lives.
A major hurdle to scaling agile is Brooks' Law: adding more people to a late project only makes it later, because communication overhead explodes. Jeff explains that to achieve linear scalability without losing productivity, organizations need a fractal, scale-free architecture and a “Minimum Viable Bureaucracy,” using the Scrum@Scale framework — anchored by an Executive Action Team (EAT) and an Executive MetaScrum.
What You'll Learn
- Why 47% of agile transformations fail even though 77% of successful agile organizations use Scrum
- How Brooks’ Law explains why adding people to a late project makes it later
- How Scrum@Scale’s Executive Action Team and Executive MetaScrum enable linear scalability
Written by Ayush Bisht · Reviewed for accuracy by Sanjay Saini
Key Takeaways
About the Speaker
Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the co-creator of Scrum and founder of Scrum Inc., where he continues to advance Scrum and Scrum@Scale for organizations worldwide. A signatory of the Agile Manifesto, he has spent more than three decades developing and teaching Scrum, working with thousands of companies across industries such as finance, healthcare, and telecom. Dr. Jeff Sutherland spoke at Scrum Day India 2020 on “Why 47% of Agile Transformations Fail.”
Presentation Deck
Follow along with the slides used in the session: