Doug Rose - Enterprise Agility For Dummies

Enterprise Agility For Dummies

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Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930061

ISBN 978-1-119-44613-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-44610-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-44609-5 (ebk)

To survive and thrive in a fast-moving economy, enterprises must work to improve their agility; they need to be able to pivot quickly to respond to new technologies, emerging opportunities and threats, and ever-evolving customer demands. However, many organizations are built more like cruise ships than jet skis. Theyre designed to command and control, making decisions at the top and passing them along the chain of command to the employees who do the work. Even when these organizations manage to change direction, theyre either too late to market or too far off course to stay ahead of the competition.

An agile enterprise is lean and nimble. Product developers collaborate closely with the organizations leaders and management and with customers to optimize value. Decision-making is distributed throughout the organization, and employees are encouraged to take the initiative, experiment and innovate, and continuously learn and improve. Agile organizations ride the waves of change instead of being tossed and turned by external factors beyond their control.

However, a large-scale agile transformation is no small feat, especially when it develops complex products that traditionally involve a great deal of up-front planning. How do you transform a large organization with deeply entrenched functional areas into a collection of small, closely aligned teams without sinking the ship? In this book, I answer that question.

Over the past ten years, Ive helped a number of large organizations become agile enterprises. Most organizations that succeed follow the same three-step approach:

1. Review the top enterprise agile frameworks.
2. Identify the organizations existing culture.
3. Create and execute a strategy for making big changes.

Those that fail never do so from a lack of trying. They fail from doing agile instead being agile. They create teams that do everything agile teams are supposed to do, but they continue to function as they always did making decisions at the top, issuing commands, and expecting employees to follow orders. They just dont try to change their mindset. As a result, they fall short of creating a culture of mutual trust and respect in which employees and customers collaborate closely to deliver innovative products. These organizations look like agile enterprises, but they never reap the full benefits of agility.

In this book, I take a three-pronged approach to transforming organizations into agile enterprises so they can both be agile and do agile:

• Being agile: To achieve enterprise agility, everyone in your organization must have a shared understanding of what it is and its purpose. If your teams understand agility, but your executives and managers dont, youll end up with teams that merely do what theyre told instead of coming up with creative solutions. In , I bring you up to speed on the agile mindset, describe agile at the team level, and present the Simple Lean-Agile Mindset (SLAM), which provides a high-level understanding of enterprise agility.
• Doing agile: In , I introduce the top enterprise agile frameworks Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), the Spotify Engineering Culture, Kanban, and Lean. Most organizations begin their agile transformations by choosing one of these frameworks and then tailoring it to meet their needs. Others may use the frameworks to generate ideas for their own custom enterprise agile framework.
• Making the transformation: In , I lead you through the process of transforming your organization to improve your enterprise agility. Here, you evaluate your organizations existing culture, choose a top-down or bottom-up approach to executing the transformation, and then follow my detailed ten-step transformation process. (Keep in mind that enterprise agility is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, not a one-time event. Your organization will evolve over time.)