Transforming for agility

“Transformation” and “agility” are different things to different people in different contexts. This section is about “achieving organisational agility” by which I mean how organisations need to transform themselves in order to respond to changes (internal & external). New ways of working popularised by tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify etc. (GAFAS effect) made a huge impact in traditional organisations across industries. But their results aren’t as expected. I devote this section to understand the myths & misunderstanding about these ways of working, present the thinking behind these methods & frameworks and then propose a way forward. I’d like to warn upfront that there will be no magic recipies or cookie-cutter solutions but a sense making approach to “transforming for agility”. Here is my current flow of thoughts:

Part 1 – The reality check

Part 2 – Theories behind the theory

  • Introduction
  • The Manifesto – making software development safe for developers
  • Software development is a bit different from other forms of engineering
  • The science behind Scrum
  • Modern management theories & organisational design

Part 3 – Transforming for agility

  • Understanding organisational agility
  • Understanding transformation
  • What experts say
  • Life beyond agile methods & frameworks
  • Breaking rules

Disclaimer

This is article is a collection of curated content that I used to make sense of the madness around agile methods, frameworks and practices. I took refuge in these articles and videos when I found that the Promised Land isn’t what I expected it to be, though I’m not naïve to expect absolute bliss there.  

Almost everything in here is copied. Sometimes I copied the sentences as they were because I couldn’t express them any better. Sometimes I restated them in my own words. I tried to provide the sources from which I copied so you can understand the context in which they were mentioned. The last thing I want is misquoting a famous person.

This article assumes basic understanding of agile methods or working in a project delivered using agile methods. For most part of the article I used method & framework interchangeably.

The Manifesto means “Manifesto for the agile software development”.

I’m an insider. I’m guilty of some or many of the things I exposed here. That’s when I learnt what works sometimes, somewhere and what doesn’t. Though I come from a “business” background, I’m biased towards technology driven agile implementations as well as technology driven transformation programmes. Most of the examples are from that perspective.

Waterfall covers all plan-driven project management methodologies & frameworks like Prince2, PMP, and MSP etc.

The views expressed in here are mine; nothing to do with client organisations or the companies I work / worked for. I tried not to identify any of the clients I worked with or the organisations I worked for, but the examples are real.

Last but by no means the least; this is not all gloom & doom. In my second article I’ll explain how to use agile thinking and allied areas in achieving organisational agility.