In November 2011 Paul Gorans, the Accelerated Solution Delivery (ASD) practice lead in IBM GBS, and I ran an agile adoption survey

.  The survey explored a range of issue, including the factors that appear to be associated with the success and failure of agile project teams.  Paul wrote up his thoughts in his Agile State of the Art Survey article on ibm.com and I did the same for Dr Dobb's Journal in Agile Success Factors.  This blog posting summarizes the results of the survey.


Factors which appear to accelerate agile adoption include:
    •  People are assigned to a single team
    • Your organization has an agile support group/community of excellence
    • Your organization is explicitly addressing barriers to agility
    • There is executive sponsorship for agile
    • Agile teams are measured on value creation
    • Your organization's IT governance strategy includes an agile path
Factors which appear to decelerate agile adoption include:
    •  Agile teams are measured using traditional metrics
 
 The survey also explored whether organizations were succeeding at large team agile and geographically distributed agile teams (yes, they are).