Enterprise Agility

Enterprise Agility is practical framework for enhancing Agility and equipping your company with the tools to survive. Key Features Prepare your company to navigate the rapidly-moving business world Enhance Agility in every component of your organization Build a framework that meets the unique requirements of your enterprise Book Description The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility. What you will learn Drive agility-oriented change across the enterprise Understand why agility matters (more than ever) to modern enterprises Adopt and influence an Agile mindset in your teams and in your organization Understand the concept of a CAS and how to model enterprise and leadership behaviors on CAS characteristics to enhance enterprise agility Understand and convey the differences between Agile and true enterprise agility Create an enterprise-specific action plan to enhance agility Become a champion for enterprise agility Recognize the advantages and challenges of distributed teams, and how Agile ways of working can remedy the rough spots Enable and motivate your IT partners to adopt Agile ways of working Who this book is for Enterprise Agility is a tool for anyone with the motivation to influence outcomes in an enterprise, who aspires to improve Agility. Readers from the following backgrounds will benefit: chief executive officer, chief information officer, people/human resource director, information technology director, head of change program, head of transformation, and Agile coach/consultant.

This is the first book to seriously address the disconnection between nimble Agile teams and other groups in the enterprise, including enterprise architecture, the program management office (PMO), human resources, and even business executives. When an enterprise experiments with practice improvements, software development teams often jump on board with excitement, while other groups are left to wonder how they will fit in. We address how these groups can adapt to Agile teams. More importantly, we show how many Agile teams cause their own problems, damaging scalability and sustainability, by requiring special treatment, and by failing to bridge the gaps between themselves and other groups. We call this phenomenon “Agile illth.” Adopting a set of “best practices” is not enough. All of us, Agile teams and the corporate groups, must change our intentions and worldviews to be more compatible with the success of the enterprise. Join us on the journey to enterprise agility. It is a crooked path, fraught with danger, confusion and complexity. It is the only way to reach the pinnacles we hope to experience in the form of better business value delivered faster for less cost.

Despite the astonishing technological developments in our times, it is surprising how little has changed in the way organizations are structured and managed. However, organizations are finally changing as they embark on agile transformations. Agility concepts emerged from the dynamics of project management and have evolved as they are being applied to organizational structure and operations. This phase of the agile evolution is known as enterprise agility. Filled with real-world scenarios and company case studies, Enterprise Agility: A Practical Guide to Agile Business Management covers the evolution of agility, including applied processes, lessons learned and realized outcomes. The book starts with the initial phase of the agile evolution, project agility and describes how waterfall project management is transformed into scrum, which can have positive effects on project timelines, scope and budget, as well as team motivation. The second phase of agility, organizational agility, is the evolution of the agile principles from temporary projects to permanent organizational structures. The book explains the main components of organizational agility, including structures, roles and ways of organizing work. It emphasizes the advantages of transitioning from traditional organizational management to agile. Finally, the latest phase, enterprise agility, transforms each function of the organization. The book acts as a guide and describes the change through the lens of each managerial domain (sales, marketing, HR, finance etc.) and by presenting the positive impact generated on the company’s overall performance based on case studies. The last chapter illustrates the enablers of this transformation and how they can help the change to be internalized so that the enterprises realize improvements. The book is based on the author’s over 15 years of experience of supporting more than 25 companies in varied sectors on their transformational journey, with the last 5 years concentrating on agility. By combining business management trends and principles of agile business development, it shows managers how to lead the transformation to enterprise agility by following the path from project agility to full enterprise agility.

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.

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.

“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.” —Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management “There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.” —Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.

Enterprise Agility in Healthcare explains why agility is vital to organizational survival. It details the critical variables that only executive leaders can address in a way that ensures success. It uses the experiences of two major healthcare organizations in order to frame the situational context surrounding the variables and then explains why and how the leaders in those organizations made choices that proved to be extraordinarily successful ... in the real world! The common challenge shared by healthcare, aerospace, and information-centric industries of every type is the extraordinary complexity and uncertainty driven by the enormous number of individual, yet codependent factors, whether in humans and their cellular functioning, or vehicles and the interaction of materials and environment, requiring leaders and decision-makers at every level to connect, interact, and synthesize vital, fluctuating data, typically via technology-intermediated network structures with varying content and scale. The networks may be obvious, like the organizational structure, while others are more abstract or virtual, like social networks and ecosystems Despite healthcare’s amazing success in improving the quality and average lifespan of human beings, the maximum lifespan remains unchanged at no more than 125 years. Very few healthcare organizations live for much longer, with most disappearing before reaching one-third of that lifespan. How systems, people, and culture respond as organizational size changes is a challenge and also an opportunity in scaling for any information-centric industry. This book will use the actual, real-world experiences of two, very successful healthcare organizations to provide specific, actionable insights into the principles and practices that provoke success. Because scaling plays a determinative role in the successful design of everything from airplanes to skyscrapers, its impact on how effective and efficient an organization is remains a continuous challenge. Perhaps understanding scaling is of greater urgency due to the increasingly large and complex structures required for companies, institutions and governments to continuously evolve the complex adaptive systems they have become. This book focuses on organizational expansion in healthcare. By examining two organizations with similar, yet very different growth experiences, this book demonstrates very successful, very real outcomes while offering key insights into the principles and practices that drove them.

"Enterprise Agility Uncovered" is your comprehensive guide to understanding the nuances of agility from every major role within an organization. By adopting a role-based approach to business transformation, this book bridges the gap between different functions, enabling everyone from the CEO to the CHRO to contribute to the Agile transformation. At its core, it deciphers the Agile methodologies, highlighting their importance across varied business landscapes. It also provides practical strategies, techniques, and real-life case studies that serve to guide each role in their Agile journey. This book demystifies the often-intimidating world of Enterprise Agility, presenting it in an accessible and relatable format. It allows readers to grasp the essence of agility from their unique perspectives, fostering a culture of shared understanding and collaborative growth. "Enterprise Agility Uncovered" ultimately serves as a toolkit for leaders and professionals, equipping them with the knowledge and strategies needed to navigate their way towards a successful Agile transformation. It's more than just a book; it's the compass that guides you towards an Agile and future-ready enterprise.