“Digital Agility- The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile” Book Preview ~ Future of CIO

Saturday, June 11, 2016

“Digital Agility- The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile” Book Preview

11:02 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The term ‘Agile’ is derived from ‘The Manifesto for Agile Software Development’ which describes a collaborative way of working based on a set of twelve principles that has come to mean early delivery of business value. The problem is people do not have a profound understanding of Agile principles and philosophy behind a set of Agile framework or tools. Most of the times they use the word "agile" when in fact they are talking about agile software development. The best way to fail is thinking that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Agile needs to be the philosophy to perceive multidimensional business values. Make the effort at the leadership and portfolio level to qualify and quantify value in terms of both strategic value and tactical value; direct revenue and indirect (vision/values/culture) terms is the first step to crafting high-level strategic intents. When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier. Once benefits of agile are visible and understood, a domino effect takes over, the organization as a whole becomes “agiler.” The purpose of the book “Digital Agility” is to:

Share the insight about agile philosophy and mindsets
Clarify a set of agile principles and disciplines
Develop the best and next agile practices to scale up
Describe potential agile pitfalls and how to prevent them
Connect the agile dots to build a creative working environment
Measure the right things about agile and measure them right
Sum up agile maturity from multidimensional perspectives

Inspire healthy debates to move agile up to the next level of maturity

From “doing Agile to being agile” is a rocky road, not a straight path: Agile is direction, not a destination. Transforming to “Being Agile” means the business knows the direction they want to go on, and as people start “putting on” the agile mindset, discover new ways of working, collaborating, delivering value, they inspect and adapt in that journey by overcoming the frictions and challenges. You have to keep things rolling, to make agile not just a methodology to manage projects, but a principle instilled into a healthy culture to run the business more effectively. To move from Waterfall to Agile is not an act of one day. It is a journey. And as long as the journey is coming to a place where we can call the organization actually Agile, Waterfall and Agile do co-exist. Some organizations stop moving and remain in the hybrid state and some just turn back to go on the previous state of the waterfall and few actually reach the destination of the Agile world. So, hybrid organizations are the reality.

Agile is a state of mind. You can not expect big bang mindset change so you need to start with agile philosophy and some initial practices that pay off and reinforce. Agile is neither just a methodology nor a set of practices, it’s the basic underlying principles of Agile! A mindset change is more difficult of a change and involves coaching, training, teaching and important discussions around what Agile is to the team, department, and company coaching, training, teaching and important discussions around what Agile is to the team, department, and company. Ultimately, all aspects of the enterprise from strategic planning to the most atomic level tasks must embrace agile for optimal effect.