Is Your Enterprise Ready for Agile Development?

What happens when an Enterprise wants to 'go agile'?

One of the beauties of agile is in its name. Who doesn't want to be agile? Can you imagine CIO of X Enterprise saying he or she doesn't want their IT departments to be agile? Agile proponents did themselves a favor adopting the generic 'agile development' to represent processes like SCRUM, Extreme Programming, etc.

But enterprises have a few issues to contend with when going agile. Enterprises are big, decentralized, with legacy technologies, standards processes, and governance concerns. Agile teams and development life cycles create challenges to those who are responsible for these enterprise structures. For example, how can agile teams experiment with new technologies and be allowed to 'fail early'? Are you willing to tear down the cubes and build open work spaces? Will your business people be open to collaborating with technologists? Are you open to a different approach to managing and measuring projects? Do your technology choices easy lend themselves to agile (think fast) development cycles?  

Also, agile practitioners (product owners, scrum masters, developers, etc.) must realize that practicing agile in an enterprise is different than the ideal environments described in literature or practiced in startups. For example, there are practical limits to self organization. 

In my last post on Getting Enterprise Executives to buy in to an Agile Development Lifecycle, I stated that organizational dynamics and culture play a significant role in the success or failure of adopting agile. This is a relatively short post on the subject, but 'going agile' can't just be isolated to the development teams. Are you ready?


1 comment:

  1. I think one of the key issues for staying agile is COMMUNICATION. Constant communication with the members of the team, Constant Collaboration and Constant Updates to the Clients.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on this blog are moderated and we do not accept comments that have links to other websites.

Share

About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.