Agile is Ready for the Enterprise

Call this the start of the agile decade. The fast pace of change and relentless competitive pressures mean companies need to continuously enhance existing products and services. Market leaders in every industry are winning new business with faster time to market for new products.

IT needs to deliver now because it is so central to everything business does. If CIOs want a seat at the table they need to be seen as the trusted and reliable partner of business. Agile is the best way to do that. It has been happening slowly as teams of developers started using agile on their own. Now their example and their success is driving enterprise adoption.

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics [1] - mhugos@yahoo.com [2] ]

Vendors of Agile Products and Services See the Change

What is driving big companies to be agile? “They want to stop failing. The world is moving so fast now; they can’t keep doing the same old things” said Todd Olson, Director of Product Marketing from Rally Software [3], a company that makes one of the more popular agile project management tools. These are times that call for something different. Because IT is central to every business operation now, CIOs need to show that they are people who can be counted on to deliver what their companies need.

Vendors report that they see their sales cycle changing. They are calling on people higher up in the enterprise. These people are feeling the pressure to deliver results and they feel the pain when they don’t deliver. Robert Holler CEO of VersionOne, [4] maker of another widely used suite of agile project management tools, said, “It will be a long implementation cycle but we see it happening. The tools are there to allow for reporting, transparency and metrics so execs can see what’s happening and not feel that things are out of control.”

Roshan Uttangi, a practice partner and certified agile coach at Wipro Consulting Services [5], a division of Wipro Limited, said that in the last 18 months 60 – 70 percent of the RFPs they get have requirements that agile techniques are well suited to address. These are things such as faster time to market and better coordination between IT and business. And often now customers just come right out and say they want to learn to be agile.

Scott Ambler [6], a highly respected agile thought leader and process expert with IBM said, “Agile is here to stay. It might get beat up by proponents of other methods, but that’s just human nature to challenge things.” Scott reports he is working with Fortune 500 companies to start up their agile transformation projects. He starts by mentoring executives in basic agile principles and then moves on to introducing techniques for how to scale agile and how to apply agile to large complex projects.

How to Get Started
 
It’s important to respect the culture of an organization. Agile cannot just be imposed on an organization. Companies need to customize it so that it fits their culture. A good way to start is to map out agile principles and values and match them to the values and operating principles of a company and adjust the agile roll out plan as necessary.

When creating an agile rollout plan, it’s important to look at more than just the IT development organization. It also important to look at HR policy, and the IT operations and system administration group, and understand the company’s regulatory environment and the procedures it has put in place to comply with those regulations. Agile practices can be tailored to fit all of these aspects of a company.

Several times in my conversations I heard the phrase “land and expand”. Pick a handful of teams and projects where agile practices can take root in a company and then grow from there. The best way to start is to create some quick wins. Don’t pick the biggest problems first. Pick important problems that can reasonably be addressed in 30 – 90 days. Show executives that agile will work in their company. Then work on the bigger and more complex problems that will take more time and involve more people.

Chris Clarke, VP of Product Management and Strategy at CollabNet [7], an international supplier of agile development and project management tools, put it this way, "Team based adoption of agile practices is easy and that has happened. Now the hard part begins." That’s the adoption of agile for large projects with distributed teams working on complex systems. Companies need to expect setbacks as they roll out agile; they have to be learning organizations and learn from their mistakes, and keep going.

At the Agile 2010 Conference [8] this year I’m starting to see a lot more senior IT people. I’m seeing not just the early adopters of agile but also lots of people from large brand name companies who openly admit this is their first time attending such a conference. They are the pragmatists, the veteran IT staffers who are checking out what agile has to offer. As one IT veteran put it, “I’m impressed with what I see here at the conference. The next time I come I’m going to bring my CIO.”

[ Michael Hugos is principal at Center for Systems Innovaton [c4si]; [9] finding elegant solutions to complex problems; mentoring teams in agile systems development. See his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World [10].]