Achieving Business Agility

Know how to lead and establish business agility in your organization. Benefit from clear, actionable steps based on change management truths that have been long underutilized and have limited the success of agile expansion into your business. This book provides a pragmatic framework for leading your business toward shifting to an agile mindset. Achieving Business Agility offers strategies and concrete examples to engage business executives and will teach you how to effectively execute these strategies. Whether you are a delivery executive, a change advocate, a consultant, a business leader, or a newcomer to agile, you will learn clear actions from a practical, business-oriented perspective that is vital to effect change and bring agile into your business. The book is structured in three sections. The first provides you with a deep understanding of each of four strategies. The second section tells the story of a company that applied these strategies through the eyes of several key players. The last section helps you get started applying what you learned in your own company. What You’ll Learn Get the attention of your executives by alerting them to a company problem that can impact them personally and create a sense of urgency to address it Collaborate with your executives in a way that gets them to open up and to see how their operating model is a contributing cause to the company problem Demonstrate how your executives can specifically benefit from a new agile business operating model and address the company problem Create a reinforcement structure on a larger scale to establish agile as the new standard operating model in your organization Who This Book Is For Managers, business leaders, and consultants at/for large enterprises or small startups who want their company to better compete in today’s fast-moving markets that present threats and opportunities at every turn. No agile expertise is required.

SAFe® 5.0: The World's Leading Framework for Business Agility "Those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the twenty-first century. SAFe 5.0 is a monumental release that I am convinced will be key in helping countless enterprise organizations succeed in their shift from project to product." –Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and author of the book Project to Product Business agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to unprecedented market changes, threats, and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions. SAFe® 5.0 Distilled: Achieving Business Agility with Scaled Agile Framework® explains how adopting SAFe helps enterprises use the power of Agile, Lean, and DevOps to outflank the competition and deliver complex, technology-based business solutions in the shortest possible time. This book will help you Understand the business case for SAFe: its benefits, and the problems it solves Learn the technical, organizational and leadership competencies needed for business agility Refocus on customer centricity with design thinking Better align strategy and execution with Lean Portfolio Management Learn the leadership skills needed to thrive in the digital age Increase the flow of value to customers with value stream networks Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Adopting the latest agile tools and practices won't be enough to respond to rapid market change. Leaders must first lay the groundwork by creating the right environment for these tools to work. Many managers struggle to install the underlying organizational operating system for business agility. High-performing agile organizations depend on the strength of six key enabling factors: leadership, culture, structure, people, governance, and ways of working. This book explains why these factors are important and how they work together to increase organizational agility. Real-world examples, stories, and tools will help leaders get realistic about the scope of changes needed in their organizations and show them how to get started. Karim Harbott does not offer a book of recipes. Instead, he focuses on mindset, principles, and general patterns. This book summarizes of the most important factors in increasing organizational agility and why they work, which leaders will need to consider in a so-called agile transformation. Because every organization is different, each will have its own route to agility and high performance. Managers will need to tackle all the areas that are crucial to creating an environment in which any chosen approach can work.

The relentless pursuit of industrial efficiency no longer yields the profits it once did because it requires a level of business predictability that no longer exists. Instead, the Internet and global video and telecom systems provide a massive and continuous flow of data that causes the whole world to behave like a giant stock market, with all the volatility and uncertainty that goes along with such markets. Responsiveness now trumps efficiency. By being responsive to the evolving needs and desires of specific groups of customers, companies can wrap their products and services in a tailored blanket of value-added services to consistently earn an additional four percent or more gross margin than they would otherwise earn for the product or service alone. This customer and market specialization is the most promising and the most sustainable source of profits in our fluid, real-time economy. Part of the Microsoft Executive Leadership Series, Business Agility discusses the three fundamental process loops that drive an agile enterprise and how they work together to deliver the responsiveness that generates profits in a high-change economy. Providing strategies for innovative and pragmatic use of people, process, and technology to drive operations in an agile enterprise, this book reveals the principles of the agile enterprise, backed by real-world case studies from the author's own experience. Michael Hugos is a speaker, writer, and practitioner in IT and business agility, and agile system development methods. He writes a column for Computerworld and a blog titled "Doing Business in Real Time" for CIO magazine.

Creating Business Agility: How Convergence of Cloud, Social, Mobile, Video, and Big Data Enables Competitive Advantage provides a game plan for integrating technology to build a smarter, more customer-centric business. Using a series of case studies as examples throughout, the book describes the agility that comes from collaborative commerce, and provides key decision makers the implementation roadmap they need to build a successful business ecosystem. The focus is on Business Agility Readiness in terms of the five major changes affecting the information technology landscape, and how data-driven delivery platforms and decision-making processes are being reinvented using digital relationships with a social business model as the consumer world of technology drives innovation and collaboration. Cloud computing, social media, next-gen mobility, streaming video, and big data with predictive analytics are major forces now for a competitive advantage, and Creating Business Agility provides leaders with a roadmap for readiness. Business leaders tasked with innovation and strategy will find that Creating Business Agility provides important insight from an informed perspective.

m-Business technology enables you to achieve extraordinary organizational agility Ñ and deliver unprecedented value to customers wherever they are. In Business Agility, Internet Week columnist Nicholas D. Evans draws upon real case studies to illuminate today's best m-Business strategies and tactics, and offers a complete step-by-step blueprint for execution: planning, process models, architecture, implementation, and much more.

Agile techniques have demonstrated immense potential for developing more effective, higher-quality software. However,scaling these techniques to the enterprise presents many challenges. The solution is to integrate the principles and practices of Lean Software Development with Agile’s ideology and methods. By doing so, software organizations leverage Lean’s powerful capabilities for “optimizing the whole” and managing complex enterprise projects. A combined “Lean-Agile” approach can dramatically improve both developer productivity and the software’s business value.In this book, three expert Lean software consultants draw from their unparalleled experience to gather all the insights, knowledge, and new skills you need to succeed with Lean-Agile development. Lean-Agile Software Development shows how to extend Scrum processes with an Enterprise view based on Lean principles. The authors present crucial technical insight into emergent design, and demonstrate how to apply it to make iterative development more effective. They also identify several common development “anti-patterns” that can work against your goals, and they offer actionable, proven alternatives. Lean-Agile Software Development shows how to Transition to Lean Software Development quickly and successfully Manage the initiation of product enhancements Help project managers work together to manage product portfolios more effectively Manage dependencies across the software development organization and with its partners and colleagues Integrate development and QA roles to improve quality and eliminate waste Determine best practices for different software development teams The book’s companion Web site, www.netobjectives.com/lasd, provides updates, links to related materials, and support for discussions of the book’s content.