Agile Development

Dr. Engr. Sohaib Ahmed

Senior Associate Professor,

Department of Software Engineering

Bahria University, Karachi Campus,

Contact:

[email protected]

[email protected]

Lecture 15: Enterprise Agility

SEN
SEN
452452
Agile
Agile
Development
Development BSE
BSE––77 Fall 2022
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 What is Enterprise Agility?

 Enterprise agility is a company’s ability to outperform the competition and drive
growth in new, ambiguous situations by learning and adapting when confronted with
foreseen and unforeseen circumstances, dilemmas, crises, and complex problems
 Companies striving to become agile must think in terms of three kinds of drivers of
change:
 the “operating environment” that might radically reshape their business
environment;
 “strategic responsiveness” or the soft levers they can pull in response;
 and the “organizational flexibility” that invariably affects their capacity to respond
quickly

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 What is Enterprise Agility?

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 What is Enterprise Agility?

 The need for Enterprise Agility is driven by the current VUCA (Volatility,
Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) market dynamics
 Competitive pressures against large organizations across industries are increasing.
Contributing to these pressures and the change in these market dynamics is
disruption from global innovators, particularly through start-up organizations which
are able to compete in new ways
 They are achieving this by pinpointing lucrative / niche segments and combining
these with a customer first focus and new technologies
 This is lowering the barrier to entry allowing start-ups to compete at scale with
traditional large corporations. Not only is the competitor and technology landscape
changing, so are customer demands for a better, more personalized service
 With the rise of digitization and the global economy, this has changed the
information customers now have access to

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 What is Enterprise Agility?

 This means the goal for organizations now also needs to change
 No longer can an organization prioritize their shareholders needs over their
customers
 They can no longer offer an average service or customer experience and see no
broader impact outside that single customer
 They can also no longer take months or years to provide customers with the
products and experiences they want
 The customer needs to be at the heart of everything they do
 As customers are now more interconnected, this heightens the need for providing
customers a great experience
 Single customer experiences can now have significant impacts on an organization,
especially through easy-to-share channels through social media and on your mobile

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 What is Enterprise Agility?

 Enterprise Agility however, not only focuses on the speed in which an organization
can adapt
 It also considers the impacts this change has on the broader organization
 When an organization needs to adapt, they need to be able to do this in a way that
has minimal negative disruption to the organization
 An organization which has achieved enterprise agility is also one that operates
effectively and with efficiencies gained in all areas across the organization (and
continuously striving to be further optimized, as there is no end state)
 It is also one that leverages the next gen and innovative technology to create a
digital experience for both customers and employees and maximizes productivity
through a high degree of automation
 Ultimately, it means changing the way we do our work across all elements of an
organization, to adopt the values highlighted in the diagram above

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 Enterprise Agility Enablers

 An organization is said to have long-term business agility if it possesses the
following salient features:
 Adaptability: Adaptability refers to the vivacity of an organization to quickly
assemble its technology, management, and resources through means such as
communication and information infrastructures in an effective, intentional, and
coordinated response to an increase in changing external and internal environments
 The market environment in question needs to be experiencing a continuous and
unanticipated change
 In contemporary organizations, continuous change is increasingly becoming a “new
normal” phenomenon
 For this reason, interest in organizational agility has increased exponentially for
managers and corporate personnel. Organizations attempt to adapt and respond to
these market changes through coordinated processes and responses, thus making the
organization adaptable

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 Enterprise Agility Enablers

 Flexibility: Agility facilitates increased flexibility in the organization. An organization
is flexible if it can easily implement its core business objectives in a loose hierarchy
and adapt to the rapid changes in the market and global environment
 An organization that can easily reshape its cultural and business practices in line with
changing circumstances through the contribution and participation of the team
members is said to be flexible and fits the description of organizational agility
 Organizational agility ensures equal contribution and participation by the team
members
 There is a team structure that is characterized by role authority where individual
members of the team have a role to play in the organization
 Efforts contributed by each member to the organization are recognized and encouraged
 These organizations focus on a result-driven rewards scheme instead of the predefined
KPIs. It also involves the extent to which the organizations can scale its knowledge
base and awareness.

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 Enterprise Agility Enablers

 Balance: Agility enables organizations to balance both the aspect of control and
autonomy through its organizational infrastructure
 The organization achieves balance among its core activities when it has acquired the
dynamic capabilities in the form of combined competencies and resource
development and has created a source of competitive advantage so as to respond
rapidly to the changes in the market conditions

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 Achieving Enterprise Agility

 Here are three ways (based on the software industry) organizations can become
more agile, regardless of its size or structure:

 Enterprise agility and self-organization: Create broader, more flexible job roles
that allow employees to organize around specific problems and initiatives they care
about. Enable them to collaborate cross-functionally to reduce dependence on others
outside the team
 Encourage them to utilize all of their skills, not just those related to their job
functions. Team size matters
 Keep teams as small as possible while ensuring that all necessary skills are included

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 Achieving Enterprise Agility

 Collaboration: Relentlessly seek out and eliminate any communication barriers that
are standing in the way of real-time collaboration
 Every “throw over the wall” wastes valuable time. Provide channels for quickly and
easily sharing information and expertise between groups
 In agile software development, physical co-location is considered optimal, but close
online collaboration can produce the same results

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 Achieving Enterprise Agility

 Autonomy for project teams: Finally, help find ways to give project teams more
autonomy. Allow teams to move more quickly by giving them decision-making
authority
 The fewer approvals and sign-offs a team needs along the path to project
completion, the better
 Teach managers to guide, oversee and support rather than direct. A leader’s top
priorities should be continually removing impediments to the team’s progress and
helping the team avoid road blocks
 Allow teams to achieve optimal efficiency and productivity as they discover the best
ways to work together

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

 The four patterns for enterprise agility have been extracted from everyday practice
in applying agile in complex, large-scale enterprises
 They can be applied individually, depending on organizational needs and objectives,
but are preferably combined for optimal value and true agility in the enterprise
context
 Surely, if the agile principles would have been applied consistently throughout the
entire service delivery chain, we wouldn’t need to discuss enterprise agility
 But reality is that many large enterprises still encounter powerful issues regarding
portfolio, scale, lifecycle management and external parties
 These four patterns illustrate a comprehensive path to enterprise agility for these
enterprises, enabling them to truly deliver on the agile promise

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

 1. Fit for Future: The first pattern revolves around the alignment of the individual
agile teams with the overall business strategy and portfolio
 Surely, having decentralized decision making to product owner level, like in Scrum,
empowers teams to respond quickly to changing market needs
 Most enterprises, however, also deal with long-term strategic themes (eg. mobile
strategy) and related programs which need to be brought into line with the several
team backlogs

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

 2. Fit for Enterprise: Organizations of substantial size generally deal with programs
comprising more than, say, 100 people working on shared program objectives
 This level of complexity and scale puts more and more pressure on monitoring
dependencies, sharing architectural guidelines and harmonizing delivery cadence
 Your organization may decide to use SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), DAD
(Disciplined Agile Delivery), may be inspired by the way of working at Spotify, or
simply use Scrum instruments to scale (Scrum of Scrums, Meta Scrum)
 Irrespective of the solution you choose, an organizational and cultural fit is key for
true agility at scale

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

 3. Fit for Lifecycle: The third pattern deals with the lifecycle scope of agile
 Despite the massive growth of DevOps cultures and Continuous Delivery practices,
most organizations that have adopted agile, still focus on agile for their software
development domain
 Making agile truly work for your enterprise implies translating its principles and
instruments to the other domains involved in the IT delivery chain
 From the moment new ideas emerge (business, IT innovation) until the moment they
are maintained in production (operations, support), agility needs to be integrated in
current practices

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 Pattern For Enterprise Agility

 4. Fit for Integration: The final pattern for enterprise agility hinges on the
observation that virtually no modern enterprise builds and runs their IT completely
in house, without any external supplier
 Almost every organization has to deal with complex value chains, comprising
multiple external parties like body shops, outsourcing partners or cloud suppliers
 Integrating these individual components to sustainable business value is key for the
modern enterprise
 Upcoming models like SIAM (Service Integration And Management) help providing
guidelines to organize for integration
 The challenge remaining here, is how to combine external agreements (fixed
contracts, SLAs) with agile behavior and processes. The most effective way to deal
with this disparity is to embrace the agile context even on integration level, such as
agile service management, reducing batch sizes, value stream mapping and focus on
cycle times

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 Benefits Of Enterprise Agility

 Increase business value creation: Enterprise agile aligns the entire organization
through a set of lightweight, shared processes and practices. By doing that, the
organization as a whole can adapt quickly as the market changes or as new ideas
come to the fore. By harnessing the entire organization to focus effectively on the
few top priorities, with progress visible to all through objective, meaningful metrics,
the organization is able to rapidly create and deliver value and then move on to the
next-highest-priority items.
 Meet customer needs and exceed expectations: The agile enterprise values rapid
feedback loops in all aspects of work—both internal and external. This builds
transparency and trust with co-workers and customers alike. The mantra of "release
early and often with high quality," as exemplified by the DevOps culture, can be
exciting for customers who learn to eagerly await the next imminent release.

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 Benefits Of Enterprise Agility

 Create a positive shared culture: By their nature, enterprise agile practices foster a
culture of teamwork, honesty, and transparency. Everyone collaborates closely,
fostering a spirit of cooperation and shared trust. Retrospectives and other forms of
actively engaging improvement opportunities mean that everyone has a real chance
to make things better. No lonely, ignored suggestion boxes needed.

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 Enterprise Agility Challenges

 1. Preparing for the Unknown: Doing business today is not about just preparing for
tomorrow. It’s about preparing for an unknown, unpredictable future that is filled
with uncertainty. Worryingly, 70 percent of executives who responded to a recent
Accenture survey expressed dissatisfaction at their inability to predict future
performance in the new normal of permanent market volatility and the uncertainty it
creates.
 2. Realizing Value from Investments, Rapidly: Any investment, whether in real
estate, resources, personnel or technology not only has to be justified at board level,
but must demonstrate a return more quickly than ever. If the days of long
implementation cycles are over, the days of stringent measurement of total cost of
ownership, combined with quick return on investment have arrived.

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 Enterprise Agility Challenges

 3. Converting Skills and Knowledge: A key challenge faced by businesses in
complex, technical industries is how to convert skills, knowledge and ideas from
individuals, as human capital into structural capital that can benefit the whole
business. In highly technical and geographically distributed industries, the
knowledge of specialist teams and employees can be an organization’s greatest asset
and therefore should be managed accordingly. Information needs to be diffused and
shared as much as possible in order to create effective knowledge transfer to new
employees and ensure vital information stays within the organization.

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 Enterprise Agility Challenges

 4. Transforming Customer and Supplier Relations: The growing digitization of
everything has not only fundamentally changed the way businesses operate, but it
has changed the way consumers think, behave and engage with organizations. The
power of the internet combined with the onslaught of mobile devices, giving
consumers access to information 24/7 means organizations must adopt a digital
transformation strategy to remain competitive. Project - and asset-based businesses
– such as energy and utilities, manufacturing, construction and defense -- are under
pressure to transform how they serve and interact with customers, suppliers and
partners.

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 Enterprise Agility Challenges

 5. Changing Working Culture, Processes and Practices: As well as adaptable
technology, adaptable people and culture within an organization are also essential to
agile businesses and helping organizations work towards a strategic vision that is
itself constantly changing. Driving this change is a new generation of worker.
According to Forbes, “Millennials are going to make major shifts in corporations
over the next decade and most people aren’t ready for the amount of change that’s
coming. By 2025, Millennials will account for 75 percent of the global workforce."
What this means for organizations is that in order to capitalize on these changes to
create business advantages, they must have the systems, processes and culture in
place to facilitate transformation, as and when it occurs.

SEN 452 Agile Development BSE – 7 Fall 2022