At SoftEd’s Sydney-based conference, Fusion, we’re bringing Agile expert Dennis Stevens across from the USA to present a keynote on the subject, ‘Enterprise Analysis: Fuelling the Agile Enterprise’ in which he will present an Enterprise Analysis model which connects company strategy to execution in a Lean and Agile way.
He will also present a two and a half hour workshop, ‘Jumpstart the Agile Enterprise: Using the Agile Enterprise Competency Model to Establish a Transformation Roadmap’ which introduces a competency framework for assessing your organisation to create an adoption and transformation roadmap which will help you pragmatically and safely introduce Agile methods to your enterprise.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, as with most things Agile, there are clear and simple principles of Enterprise Agile, but they can become convoluted and complicated when not understood or implemented properly. So much so that Dennis has used his insights and experience to create a business out of helping organisations get this sort of thing right. If this is something you feel your organisation could benefit from it’s well worth booking to attend Fusion on 13-14 September 2012.
In the meantime here is a quick look at Enterprise Agile with the help of Dennis and some other industry experts:
You may have already heard about Enterprise Agile before, after all it supposedly allows organisations to achieve a faster time to market, lower costs, higher business value, better use of people’s skills and greater responsiveness to changes in the market, and who wouldn’t want that?
Sometimes there is confusion about the meaning of Enterprise Agile – it’s not just about the number of teams or the number of people. Mike Cottmeyer (who will be presenting on the Agile 2012 Enterprise Agile stage) says that whether you have one or 100 teams doing Agile, “if those teams live within a non-Agile project environment, if they are not tightly integrated with the overall value stream, or they represent a small piece of the end-to-end process, you really just have one or more instances of small team Agile”.
Enterprise Agile is about end-to-end Agile, a holistic approach where every department in an organisation is working in an integrated way towards a common goal, and through this integration, they are able to respond and adapt to challenges and changes quickly. “Let’s take the case of being a software product company as an example. You can create new product releases every month, but can your marketing organisation handle a release every month? And what about sales, support, training, finance, etc.? In an Agile enterprise the marketing and sales side of the organisation is balanced with product development. In an Agile enterprise, the entire business is organised in a way that it can respond quickly to changes in the market. All departments are fully integrated with the overall value stream, there is end-to-end agility. Even at the executive level the focus is on smaller bets, on short feedback cycles. It is such an end-to-end approach which is an important characteristic of enterprise agile”.
(here is a link to Mike Cottmeyer and Dennis Stevens’ Agile 2011 presentation on Exploring Enterprise Agile Transformation Strategies).
Since the 2001 Agile Manifesto the ‘Agile movement’ has been focused on Agile Software Development teams. For the most part Agile has been successful, and where Agile adoption has failed there has been some political or cultural resistance which has prevented Agile methodologies from fully flourishing.
Although Enterprise Agile is much more than just scaling up the number of teams practising Agile, there are some things which you will need to make Agile work, both for teams and the enterprise.
One of these is the right organisational culture. Agile methodologies are about creating open, communicative environments in which no-one is afraid to say the wrong thing and where success is measured at a team level, not by individuals striving to achieve their own, sometimes conflicting, targets. For example if a tester is told they need to find a certain number of bugs they may not be as helpful in trying to plan a project in a way which reduces the likelihood of bugs occurring (I’m not trying to single out testers here – anytime anyone is measured by a certain metric they will work towards that metric; Agile practitioners focus on overall product quality and value delivered to customers).
You also need leadership and planning; in this presentation, Dennis Stevens discusses the levels of planning required. He also discusses the need to be explicit, to create policies that adopt the practices of Agile at an enterprise level, and the most important factor, the underlying thinking behind the Agile approach. Without an organisation-wide understanding of the thinking behind Agile organisational change will inevitably be met with resistance; “managers need to understand why Agile works and what makes small teams so good at delivering software”
This becomes even more important at an enterprise level, where so many inter-dependencies exist (despite even the best efforts to eradicate them, some will always remain) and if one ‘branch’ of an Agile Enterprise is not fully engaged with the process this will have a knock-on effect in other areas.
Watch Sanjiv Augustine and Arlen Bankston’s take on the seven deadly sins of Enterprise Agile adoption here.
So we can see that Enterprise Agile is not easy, but the pay-offs can be great. Agile software development teams consistently say that they are more engaged, have a better understanding of company goals and how their work fits in with them, and they produce better quality software. Imagine these benefits scaled up across a whole enterprise.
Hopefully, the articles and insights from this post will get you started on the road to Enterprise Agile, and if you want to know more, book your place to see Dennis Stevens at Fusion today.