Agile is being picked up in software development but also other parts of the organisation, such as marketing, finance, and other divisions.
This is according to Scott Ambler and Mark Lines, world authorities on agile development, at IndigoCube’s Business Agility event recently held in Sandton.
Agility promotes effective, self-organising teams that collaborate and learn from one another to rapidly and continuously innovate to deal with the modern pace of technology, business, social, economic, and political upheaval.
“I see financial organisations running scared from disruption,” says Ambler. “They have to be agile to deal with disruption but becoming agile is complex, and becoming more so. Being agile means that these organisations must not only be able to rapidly adapt to change but in some cases be the change themselves, changing and shifting at a moment’s notice, and doing so without losing momentum. That’s a big challenge for most organisations.”
Executives are so pressured to develop agile capabilities in their businesses, he says, that they often look for the secret recipe they can buy and deploy or training to certify their employees.
There is no secret recipe and no shortcut to successfully becoming agile.
“Developing an agile capability is more than telling your software developers to use a new tool that helps them code applications faster. It’s about changing the way you do business, the way you run the organisation, and the way you serve customers,” he says.
Lines agrees. “Change is key,” he says, “and we get asked a lot how people can get this stuff into their organisations. Agility is more than a software development approach because it fundamentally alters the business model. That means developing agility necessitates change management.
“We’ve found over the past few years, working with insurance organisations in Canada, retailers, financial institutions and others, that small, almost imperceptible changes work but big changes do not.”
Transforming enterprises for business agility demands that you explain the need for change, how the organisation is preparing for the change, and how the change will be executed.
“Our first book is 500 pages and it’s just the first book,” he says. Scrum, by contrast, is 18 pages of awesomeness but it’s just 18 pages. How do you adequately share with people the 95% of activities it takes to transform an organisation form traditional to agile in so few pages? It’s impossible. So we developed Disciplined Agile (DA) to help people, to give them the options from which they can select what’s best suited to their environments, their situations, and their objectives.”
Scott and Lines acknowledge that no organisation is text-book perfect, which means their DA framework must be flexible, adaptable, to share knowledge that enables people to choose trade-offs.
“The Disciplined Agile framework is extensive and, while not being prescriptive, it arms people with the information they need to understand the implications of their choices within context,” says Jaco Viljoen, principal consultant and head of digital at IndigoCube. “The knowledge enables people to learn early and gives them the wide ranging understanding they need to be able to understand the bigger picture, or the optimised whole.”