'If you try to do everything agile, you will create bottlenecks,' says Shop Direct CIO

If you have too few product owners within the business, you'll run into roadblocks, says Andy Wolfe

If organisations attempt to use agile methodologies for every single project, they will run into roadblocks, according to the CIO of Shop Direct, Andy Wolfe.

Last week, Computing investigated whether companies could ever have too many agile projects on the back of research from practice insight and technology company CEB. CEB found that after initial success of using agile projects, organisations may be tempted to increase the number of projects they have on the go, but then they may hit a trough, where if they try and do more than that, it actually begins to slow things down.

Wolfe, who is responsible for delivery of change across business, as well as being in charge of IT at Shop Direct, believes that too many agile projects in any organisation can be more of a hindrance than a help.

"If you have too few product owners within the business then you actually start to create bottlenecks; if you try to do everything agile, you will create bottlenecks because you haven't got the business resource available to you to help you deliver that change," he told Computing at Oracle OpenWorld last week.

He added that "not everything lends itself well to agile", suggesting that some projects such as traditional back-end IT projects work better using waterfall.

"From my perspective, agile works for us. It is part and parcel of what we do every day," Wolfe said.

"[There are] areas we think it works best; in our front-end , in our commerce app. It works well in terms of how we deploy change and how we work with the business to deliver that change," he added.

Read: Agile methodology: Can you ever have too many agile projects?