Sometimes, Agile Alone Isn’t Enough
This is primarily a book to help managers like Frank. It is directed at the mid-level manager that needs to develop an approach for adopting agile within their part of a larger organization. These are people that want practical guidance on what to do next and how to articulate why what they decided is the next right move. Managers like Frank need a framework to facilitate conversations about what to focus on first and how to build their organizations within a larger organizational context. They need to understand how their decisions impact their teams and how their teams impact the larger enterprise value streams.>div>
This book is geared toward helping these managers incrementally adopt agile and build out a scalable agile enterprise. That said, agile methodologies are primarily intended to work with small teams and not necessarily designed to scale. When it comes to agile in larger enterprises, we find that much of what is prescribed is incongruent with where most organizations find themselves.
“A light framework that leaves out things that are sometimes useful can be smart. One that leaves out things that are virtually always useful is ineffective”.
Allan Shalloway, NetObjectives
To effectively build a sustainable agile enterprise, we will need to go beyond some of our standard agile thinking and incorporate learning’s from the methodologies that came before (waterfall and RUP) and those that are coming after (Lean and Kanban). We will draw from luminaries in the fields of manufacturing, team dynamics, organizational design, change management, systems thinking, conversation theory, and organizational learning. Along the way, we’ll need Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, Covey’s Seven Habits, and Kotter’s Leading Change amongst many others.