Is Your Company Agile?

On my recent book tour in London, I was asked to appear on Sky News. They asked me to talk about why the United Kingdom's productivity is less than other G7 countries. The hot topic of the day was earnings reports from U.K. companies and U.S. companies based in the U.K. They told me to be prepared to talk about productivity and how that affects earnings of specific companies.

I've done Scrum transformations in companies where the stock price has doubled during the implementation for a large company (Medco) and quadrupled for a medium sized company (Pegasystems). You can read about Medco in my new book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. We wrote an IEEE Digital Library paper on Pegasystems: Hitting The Wall: What to Do When High Performing Scrum Teams Overwhelm Operations.

If you click the chart to your right, you can see that Pegasystems at 25% revenue growth year over year since they introduced Scrum in mid-2009. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is tanking.

Earnings and company valuations are dependent on strategy and cool products as well as agility. Nevertheless, for Sky News I needed some data to discuss and I needed it quickly so I turned to resumes on LinkedIn. For all the current employees at leading companies, how many have agile resumes? I got some really interesting results. (See the chart below)

Based on my time in many of these companies, I think these numbers are a good indication of how high management prioritizes agility. If you disagree, do your own analysis. I'm interested in getting any corrections or new insights. To my surprise, these companies group into Awesome (>50% agile), Exellent (>20%), and Wannabe's (<20%).

This may be a blunt instrument but it got me through my prime time interview on Sky News!

-- Jeff