Understanding Enterprise Agile
Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 August 2011 05:18 Written by Mike Cottmeyer Tuesday, 16 August 2011 12:25
Based on the topics presented at the Agile 2011 conference last week, I think that we as a community might misunderstand what enterprise agile is all about. To me, enterprise agile is not about one or two teams doing agile in a gigantic company. It’s not even about 100 teams doing agile in a gigantic company. If those teams live within a non-agile project environment, if they are not tightly integrated with the overall value stream, or they represent a small piece of the end-to-end process, you really just have one or more instances of small team agile. Teams which just happen to be operating in a large enterprise.
Enterprise agility is more about being able to inspect and adapt in the large. It’s about making smaller bets at the executive level. It’s about having the ability to balance the sales and marketing side of the business with your ability to create working products, and then support those products in a sustainable way. Enterprise agility is about integrating finance and human resources so that our entire business is setup to respond to changes in the market, and holistically we are able to deliver the most value possible within the time and cost constraints we’ve established. Personally, I’d rather talk about a 125 person company end-to-end than one or two teams in a 20,000 person company.
As a community, I’d like us to start producing more case studies about what is working, and what’s not working, as some of us try to do these things in real companies. I’d like to see the conferences open up and realize that end-to-end agility is the next big frontier, and we need to start talking about adoption and transformation patterns that scale at these levels of the organization. Here is a link to the talk that Dennis and I did last Tuesday called ‘Exploring Enterprise Agile Transformation Strategies’. It’s clearly not the final word, but it’s the stuff we are doing to help enable true end-to-end business agility for the customers we work with.
http://www.slideshare.net/mcottmeyer
Would be interested in your thoughts… is enterprise agile just about super large companies, or is it more about the a breadth of the transformation, and the number of business processes we have a chance to impact? Do the patterns that work for 125 scale to 20,000? I think so… but only time and experience will tell.
For me, it’s about breadth of transformation. For large(r) companies, it seems to be about 4-5 teams on a project trying to deal with the rest of the organization working on a waterfall schedule and/or with siloed functional specialities and/or with corporate requirements/compliances associated with up-front and back-end “phases” that must be traversed, i.e., Agile in the enterprise.
Thanks for the comment Scott. One of my talks last week I made the explicit distinction between Agile in the Enterprise vs. Enterprise Agile… I think we need to talk more about Enterprise Agile.
It may just be me… but when I click on your link I go somewhere completely different for the slides!
Peter… got it fixed… thanks for the heads up.
Enterprise Agile isn’t about large companies. It’s about embedding Agile into the blood stream of the entire company, large or small. You really cannot use the word “transformation” if you’ve only transformed a part. That’s not a transformation. That’s a quarter or half or tenth of a transformation.
Mike, I like the Ent. Agile awareness you have here. I’m working with a few on some of the diagrams and happen to be modeling different businesses from a maturity perpsective. Let’s finish some work together on this one as the rest of 2011 goes around. Great talking at Agile2011, hope it continues.
Yes, great talking to you too. Do you have anything published on this you can link my readers to? I’d love to hear more about what you have to say.
Peter… totally agree!