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Businesses struggle to be agile. Not necessarily true. Businesses don't want Agile. Okay, what's the real problem?

We understand Agile on the IT side, but what does it mean for the business? In adopting Agile, the business looked at it from a business-value perspective. We decomposed enhancements and additions to products into themes and features and planned them along the business / product roadmap. Basically, we deconstructed the business roadmap into quarterly products and milestones.

There was no change in how business releases were conducted or planned. Agile introduced a cadence for developing products. We switched from big-bang to incremental delivery. There were definitely some downsides. Way more features to manage and track. A greater number of teams are supporting and contributing to development efforts. However, one thing was the same. The business came first. End of story; their roadmap was the roadmap.

In my experience, any methodology can work if you establish measurable, repeatable results. Technically, it's called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). On every call we had with product development, the leaders asked, "Have you relayed this approach to our business teams?"

My guess is this is why Agile has a low adoption rate in businesses. Being largely an IT development method, teams forget that they're supposed to support the business. Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, all great delivery-focused disciplines that aim to meet a business objective. 

To overcome Agile adoption challenges, follow your business roadmap, but plan for incremental releases (quarterly or bi-monthly). While you'll have to do a bit more work tracking themes, epics, and features, the incremental checkpoints ensure there are fewer mistakes along the way.