More than a third of UK IT decision makers say they lack the know-how to adopt agile

Budget and time to implement a truly agile approach are other reasons why agile isn't adopted, finds CA Technologies survey

More than a third (36 per cent) of UK IT decision makers believe that the agile methodology is not being adopted because there is a lack of understanding of it as a concept.

This is one of the key findings of a survey of 150 UK IT decision makers undertaken by CA Technologies.

CA Technologies claims that the survey suggests that IT decision makers "understand the business benefits of agile", but this is only backed up by just over a third (52) of the respondents stating that agile can to some extent help IT departments to do more with fewer resources.

Nevertheless, 82 per cent of respondents said they believe there are still challenges to widespread adoption of agile in their organisations - with 15 per cent saying this is budget-related, 34 per cent stating that this is because of the time it takes to implement a truly agile approach, and 33 per cent asserting that agility does not fit in with the current business culture; 36 per cent believe that it is down to a lack of understanding of agile as a concept.

But CA found that agile adoption was on the up - with 42 per cent of respondents stating that agile adoption has increased in their organisation's IT department over the past 12 months. However, only 30 per cent believe it has increased across the organisation as a whole, although it is expected to expand into other areas of the business in the near future. A quarter of IT decision makers said they are currently experiencing growth of agile into other practices beyond IT, with nearly half (49 per cent) expecting to experience this within the next 12 months. Meanwhile 70 per cent of respondents said they expected investment in agile to increase in the future.

Only 18 per cent of respondents said that their organisation is currently "fully agile", with a further 62 per cent of respondents stating that their organisation is agile to an extent. This leaves 20 per cent of UK IT decision makers who believe their organisation is not agile at all.

Computing looked into the use of agile methodologies last year. Essentially agile is an alternative to traditional project management, and is usually used in software development. It requires collaboration between self-organising and cross-functional teams, in order to rejig requirements and solutions in shorter time-frames.

However, findings from best practice and insight firm CEB's State of Agile Survey, suggested that there can be a time when a company tries to implement too much of agile, and this can in fact slow the organisation down.