Process Insights - Amazee Agile Agency Survey Results - Part 2

This is part two of our series processing the results of the Amazee Agile Agency Survey. In Part 1, I provided an overview of initial observations from survey results. Here, in Part 2 I would like to focus on process insights.

In Part 1, we identified Scrum as the most important process for Drupal agencies. Kanban was stated as “somewhat in use” for the most part and also had various agencies stating it as “mostly in use”.

We also asked about “Other important processes?”. From the results, respondents mentioned “Critique, automated testing, collaborative sketching”, such as GitLab workflow, DSDM, Holacracy, Extreme Programming (XP), and Agency Agile.

When asked about how strictly the process would be implemented, the top rated option by 36.7% (on a scale from 1-5) was a “4”, which indicates these agency processes are followed rather strictly. Following this is a “3”, which indicates a balance between strict adherence and many adaptations, and a “2”, which refers to rather many adaptations. Fewer agencies still indicated an even split between either very strictly follow processes and implementing many adaptations to processes.  

When asked for which adaptations were applied to their processes, agencies mentioned the following:

• Custom dashboards
• Backlog organization of “in scope” versus “out of scope”
• As scrum is all about inspect and adapt, the result will always look differently
• Scrum gets adapted to different customer needs or other stakeholders in the company asking for it
• Often clients expect fixed price offers with a fixed scope and fixed deadline, results is trying to be agile within those borders
• The best process is invisible and will feel natural once you found the best way, process needs to match individuals needs

From our experience at Amazee, I’d say we tend towards a “4” where we try to follow Scrum strictly but we also don’t want to overdo it. As mentioned in the comments, Scrum is really about the team taking ownership of the process, which requires flexibility. We constantly try to adapt our processes where we feel it helps fulfill our mission to deliver great software to our clients.

How do you structure your processes and what works best for you? Feel free to leave us a comment below. If you are interested in an Agile or Scrum training for yourself or your company, contact us.

Stay tuned for next post where we’ll look at teams: sizes, location, and team assignments.