AgileCamp Dallas 2019

To achieve significant business results from adopting agile, organizations must focus on full end-to-end business agility. Such a focus involves the entire value chain of how the organization operates including budgeting, planning, legal, controls, HR, marketing, sales, etc. Most large-scale agile adoptions have historically focused on some or all of the development/IT departments within an organization. Although there are certainly benefits to be gained by embracing agility in the development areas, this approach is myopic and misses the bigger picture that development must occur within a larger system context. What is needed is end-to-end business agility where the whole system is considered and decisions and optimizations happen at the whole system level, of which development is but one piece.

When taking a full end-to-end perspective, we can expose many significant issues that impede an organization’s large-scale agile journey. For example, most organizations will not become fully end-to-end agile immediately, which means they will need to operate in a hybrid world of both agile and non-agile. Also, most organizations have historically used “projects” as their unit of focus for budgeting, planning, and team organization. Projects are a very poor unit of focus; fortunately there are specific characteristics we can leverage to make a better choice. And, dependencies among collaborating teams has made it nearly impossible for many organizations to reliably and predictably get the work done. There are multiple patterns for dealing with inter-team dependencies that need to be woven together into a holistic end-to-end solution. Finally, we need practical ways of using metrics in the context of a full end-to-end business agility environment that provide actionable information at multiple levels.

Over the past 10 years Ken has been assisting companies with their larger-scale agile journeys. In several of these companies he has been engaged for multiple years on large (1000+ people) agile efforts. During this presentation he will communicate strategies and actual approaches that have been applied to the real issues he has encountered. The goal of this presentation is to communicate actual lessons learned, not theory.