Building The Agile Enterprise

In the last ten years IT has brought fundamental changes to the way the world works. Not only has it increased the speed of operations and communications, but it has also undermined basic assumptions of traditional business models and increased the number of variables. Today, the survival of major corporations is challenged by a world-wide marketplace, international operations, outsourcing, global communities, a changing workforce, security threats, business continuity, web visibility, and customer expectations. Enterprises must constantly adapt or they will be unable to compete. Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow, presents IT as a key enabler of the agile enterprise. He demonstrates how the convergence of key technologies—including SOA, BPM and emerging enterprise and data models—can be harnessed to transform the enterprise. Cummins mines his 25 years experience to provide IT leaders, as well as enterprise architects and management consultants, with the critical information, skills, and insights they need to partner with management and redesign the enterprise for continuous change. No other book puts IT at the center of this transformation, nor integrates these technologies for this purpose. Shows how to integrate and deploy critical technologies to foster agility Details how to design an enterprise architecture that takes full advantage of SOA, BPM, business rules, enterprise information management, business models, and governance Outlines IT's critical mission in providing an integration infrastructure and key services, while optimizing technology adoption throughout the enterprise Illustrates concepts with examples and cases from large and small commercial enterprises Shows how to create systems that recognize and respond to the need for change Identifies the unique security issues that arise with SOA and shows how to deploy a framework of technologies and processes that address them

Discover how to implement and operate in an Agile manner at every level of your enterprise and at every point from idea to delivery. Learn how Agile-mature organizations adapt nimbly to microchanges in market conditions. Learn cutting-edge practices and concepts as you extend your implementation of Agile through the entire enterprise to meet customer needs. Veteran Agile coach Mario Moreira argues that two critical conditions must be conscientiously cultivated at a company before it can expect to reap in full measure the business benefits of mature Agile. First, individuals at every level must be committed to the mindset and the implementation of practices rigorously focused on delivering value to the customer. Second, all employees must be empowered to take ownership. This holistic transformation wrenches the status quo and provokes a strong focus where customers and employees matter. What You'll Learn Establish an idea pipeline to quickly and productively evolve customer value through all levels of the enterprise Incorporate a discovery mindset—experimental, incremental, design, and divergent thinking—and fast feedback loops to increase the odds that what you build aligns more closely to what customer wants Leverage Lean Canvas, personas, story mapping, value stream mapping, Cost of Delay, servant leadership, self-organization, and more to deliver optimum value to customers Use continuous agile budgeting and idea pipelines at the senior levels of the enterprise to enable you to adapt to the speed of the market Reinvent human resources, portfolio management, finance, and many areas of management toward new roles in the enablement of customer value Map a top-to-bottom and end-to-end holistic view of your Agile galaxy to gauge where you are today and where you’d like to go in your Agile future Be truly Agile throughout your enterprise, focused on customer value and employees above all else Who This Book Is For Executives and senior management; sponsors of Agile within a company; ScrumMasters and Agile coaches, champions, and consultants; project management and quality assurance officers (PMOs and AMOs); portfolio managers; product managers and product owners; marketing and business managers; functional, middle, and resource managers; engineering heads and managers; cross-functional engineering/scrum teams; and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists

Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation is an in-depth look at transforming businesses so they are fit for purpose in a digitally enabled world. It is a guide for all those needing to better understand, implement and lead digital transformation in the workplace. It sets aside traditional thinking and outdated strategies to explain what steps need to be taken for an organization to become truly agile. It addresses how to build organizational velocity and establish iterative working, remove unnecessary process, embed innovation, map strategy to motivation and develop talent to succeed. Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation provides guidance on how to set the pace and frequency for change and shows how to break old habits and reform the behaviours of a workforce to embed digital transformation, achieve organizational agility and ensure high performance. Full of practical advice, examples and real-life insights from organizational development professionals at the leading edge of digital transformation, this book is an essential guide to building an agile business.

Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Launching, Sustaining, or Improving Any Agile Enterprise Transformation Initiative As long-time competitive advantages disappear, astute executives and change agents know they must achieve true agile transformation. In Unlocking Agility, Jorgen Hesselberg reveals what works, what doesn’t, and how to overcome the daunting obstacles. Distilling 10+ years of experience leading agile transformation in the enterprise, Hesselberg guides you on jumpstarting change, sustaining momentum, and executing superbly on customer commitments as you move forward. He helps you identify appropriate roles for consultants, optimize organizational structures, set realistic expectations, and measure against them. He shares first-hand accounts from pioneering transformation leaders at firms including Intel, Nokia, Salesforce.com, Spotify, and many more. • Balance building the right thing, the right way, at the right speed • Design a holistic transformation strategy using five dimensions of agility: Technology, Organizational Design, People, Leadership, and Culture • Promote agile skills, knowledge, and abilities throughout your workforce • Incorporate powerful leadership models, including Level 5, Teal, and Beyond Budgeting • Leverage business agility metrics to affect norms and change organizational culture • Establish your Agile Working Group, the engine of agile transformation • Define operating models and strategic roadmaps for unlocking agility, and track your progress You already know agile transformation is essential. Now, discover how to customize your strategy, execute on it in your environment, and achieve it.

One of the first widely available resources on the subject of adaptive enterprise. The text takes on a new and burgeoning field of study and development and provides the opportunity to help shape and guide the thinking of decision makers in the world of both public and private sectors. The authors contribute a wealth of experience from professional situations having worked for IBM Global Services Consulting Group and SAP Institute for Innovation and Development.

Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way. For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way. The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.

Building upon his earlier book that detailed agile data warehousing programming techniques for the Scrum master, Ralph's latest work illustrates the agile interpretations of the remaining software engineering disciplines: Requirements management benefits from streamlined templates that not only define projects quickly, but ensure nothing essential is overlooked. Data engineering receives two new "hyper modeling" techniques, yielding data warehouses that can be easily adapted when requirements change without having to invest in ruinously expensive data-conversion programs. Quality assurance advances with not only a stereoscopic top-down and bottom-up planning method, but also the incorporation of the latest in automated test engines. Use this step-by-step guide to deepen your own application development skills through self-study, show your teammates the world's fastest and most reliable techniques for creating business intelligence systems, or ensure that the IT department working for you is building your next decision support system the right way. Learn how to quickly define scope and architecture before programming starts Includes techniques of process and data engineering that enable iterative and incremental delivery Demonstrates how to plan and execute quality assurance plans and includes a guide to continuous integration and automated regression testing Presents program management strategies for coordinating multiple agile data mart projects so that over time an enterprise data warehouse emerges Use the provided 120-day road map to establish a robust, agile data warehousing program