Agile2013 Briefing Deck

Editor's Notes

• #3: Where is the market today?  From a crossing the chasm perspective the Agile industry is deep into the early majority stageThis means that large institutions are now making large investments in Agility. Large institutions such as Fortune 500 and the federal government. This is a new test for the agile industry, where up to now most of Agile value has been obtained by focusing on small teams. Certainly is canonical to Agility that value comes from small Agile teams. But now to achieve the objectives of large institutions we need to coordinate the efforts of many small Agile teams. Now Agile must deliver value through very large programs housed in very large institutionsThe stakeholders now include not just developers, their business or customer representative acting as Product owner and the dev but also many different kinds of organizational stakeholders, especially management stakeholders representing different functions of the business including Business unit executives, HR, finance, marketing, corporate governance ranging from executives through to middle management.  Management as a key audience in the Agile industry is a relatively new thing. When Dean Leffingwell released his Scaled Agile framework there was a huge response, which demonstrated the pent up demand for a management level discussion regarding Agility which until Dean’s initiative had relatively little to say. Certainly there were many examples of large scale Agile role outs beforehand but the Industry itself had not yet distilled this experience into advice and council to Agile consumers everywhere as it has done so successfully for Agile teams. This is a new frontier in the Agile industry. All the knowledge and knowhow regarding Agile teams learning to use Scrum, XP, Kanban still is necessary but no longer sufficient. What is needed in addition is how to conduct what we might call Agile program management, understand how Agility impacts program portfolio management and how the role of management and executive leadership changes in an agile environment.  In addition to deploy agility in the larger organization requires significant organizational change management and structured change programs that can be coordinated across multiple geographies. It will also be important that these change programs implement Agility in an Agile way. In fact as many large organizations may start the conversation regarding Agility by viewing Deans framework, they ultimately will need to develop a change solution that is customized for their business. Ultimately for these Agile change programs to have lasting success they will need to leave the client with the ability to autonomously continuously improve and evolve their Agile capability, since continuous improvement is at the heart of Agility. That means as strange as it might sound that Agility will be institutionalized in large organizations. Institutional does not need to mean bureaucratic. Agility will be institutionalized through the use of Agile institutions such as Coaching offices and facilitating communities of practice.  Where is the industry going? Within the IT space Agility is being broadly adopted world-wide. We can look forward to a time when Agility will be the norm not the new idea. What we also see is that Agile values and principles are bleeding through to other business functions. SolutionsIQ has worked for years with Joe Justice of Wikispeed fame with clients interested in applying Agile concepts learned in software development in a manufacturing environment on the shop floor. We use the phrase at SolutionsIQ that Agility is for “Knowledge workers everywhere” The phenomenal success of the lean start up demonstrates that Agile principles have broad applicability as the way to operationalize innovation from a business perspective. Steven Blank recently wrote an article published in HBR that made that case that the Agile principles illustrated in the lean startup have broad applicability to not just startups but all businesses—large and small, early stage or late. I and my co-author Mark Mueller-Eberstein are writing a book called “The Agile CEO” which will discuss how Agile principles can be and need to supplement traditional management practices for business success in the 21st century
• #6: Comprehensive program that establishes Agile practices and facilitates organizational changeAgile strategies for Agile adoption, using an incremental, iterative, transparent approach to the processEmbedded Agile experts who collaborate with teams on deliverables while mentoring then on Agile best practicesBaseline and ongoing metrics for visibility of program progress and analyses of the program evolution
• #8: 11 scrum teams representing PremeraeComm groupApproximately 35 key stakeholdersPlanning rolling four months of workCommitment from leadership to host release planning sessions every quarter (their next one is scheduled for September)Session spanned 2.5 days and included eComm “all hands” meetingWe worked with PremeraeComm teams heavily for two months prior to the event to get the teams ready to participateWe introduced the concept of Team Speed Dating to force conversations between teams to occur – this was received extremely well by all of the teams and the stakeholders who observed the most amount of collaboration every seen by the group.