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New Whitepaper: The Big Picture Of Enterprise Agility
Posted on August 17, 2009 by Dean Leffingwell in Agile Executive, Agile Release Train, Scaled Agile Framework/Big PictureReaders of this blog are likely aware that effectively implementing software agility at the enterprise level is no small feat. Even for the fully committed department or enterprise, it can take six months to a year to introduce and master many of the basic agile practices and a number of additional years to achieve the productivity and quality results that fully warrant the effort of such a significant enterprise-wide transformation. As challenging as this process may be however, a number of large organizations have made the transition before us and patterns for success have started to emerge.
In my discussions with teams, managers, and executives during over the last year or two, I often struggled to find a language for discussion, along with a set of abstractions and an appropriate graphic that I could use to quickly describe some of these patters of “what your enterprise would look like after such an agile transformation”.
In doing so, I would need to be able to describe the new software development and delivery process mechanics, the new teams and organizational units, and some of the roles key individuals play in the new agile paradigm. In addition, any such Big Picture should highlight the requirements practices of the enterprise agile model, because those artifacts uniquely carry the value stream to the customer.
Eventually, and with help from others, I arrived at something that worked reasonably well for its purpose. I call it the Agile Enterprise Big Picture and it appears in Figure 1 below.
Big Picture
Figure 1 – The Big Picture of Enterprise Agility
Over the last year, I’ve described the Big Picture fairly extensively in a length series of blog posts under the series http://scalingsoftwareagility.wordpress.com/category/big-picture/. However, in blog series form, it’s hard to get the gestalt of this somewhat complex construct, as the posts are fairly short and quite numerous. Frankly, it takes some hard work on the part of the reader to piece together “the Big Picture of the Big Picture”.
So I’ve written the whitepaper below, wherein I explain the Big Picture at a level of detail conducive to the overview, summary level. You can download it here:
The Agile Enterprise Big Picture (2)
I hope it delivers some value to you, and as always, comments are welcome.
Dean,
I am trying to implement Tiered model as you depicted in your blog for my team. I would really appreciate if you can take some time to go through my blog and provide your feedback.
http://www.practiceagile.com/2009/08/enterprise-scrums-tiered-approach.html
Thanks,
-Hiren Doshi
Hi Hiren,
I took a quick look at your blog on the tiered model topic and the feature vs. component teams debate. You’ve done a good job of providing a sense of balance on how these theories apply at scale, and the judgement that is required when team distribution is really the driving factor, rather than idealism of potential efficiency.
Readers would do well to check your blog on this topic and If I get a chance, I’ll put up a link post as well.
–Dean
Thanks Dean for your feedback. I feel honored to get on your blogroll.
Thanks,
-Hiren
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