CIO/IT Directors - What Agile Means to You
Agile is a double-edged sword!
On the one hand, following a period of intense change, budget spend and organisational upheaval... your department will have quicker cycle times to market, be more predictable operationally, produce higher quality software, have better working relationships with its customers and will be more adaptive to changes of business objectives and requirements.
On the other hand, all the department's problems that you know currently exist will become very visible and transparent very quickly.
All those skeletons in closets you've been dampening down, or battles you've been fighting to secure funding will rise to the top of agendas.
If you're looking for an easy ride or at least some calm seas, don't start agile.
Agile methodologies expose the weaknesses in your value stream of delivering software, it exposes poor infrastructure, asset management, governance, processes, delivery, and most fundamentally, it will expose weak people...
Agile not only highlights these problems, it rubs your face in it by reporting all the dirty linen as impediments and waste, and directly attributes slow delivery to the specific problem. These could include lack of testing environments, or poor VM performance, or production support interruptions, or no automated tests, or poor architecture etc, etc, etc.
Not only that, but if you walk this road, your department will start to judge you and the success of the agile initiative by your personal ability to secure funding and remove organisational impediments i.e. your executive skills.
So before you start down this road I think the first question for a CIO should be "Should building software be a core competency of this company?"
If the answer is no, then maybe the answer lies elsewhere in out-sourcing your software development to a good agile house. Forrester is a good start for compiling your short-list of agile companies such as Thoughtworks.
However, if there is a need for a strong software development capability because technology is fundamental to your business strategy, and the board of directors are in agreement, then agile is the best approach. This is because Agile development, specifically Extreme Programming, is one of the the most disciplined approaches to software development in the world.
So, let's assume you're a pro-active CIO/IT Director, with a supportive board behind you, ready for the challenge... Where do you start?
Fundamentally, you're initiating a change programme to completely overhaul the way your company builds software. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing anything less!
The change will affect everyone involved, your consumers, your internal customers, finance, marketing, HR, Operations and your own area.
Forget the Hype - Moving to Agile is a large organisational change programme that will overhaul your approach to software delivery.
Make no mistake, it's about people, its about change and therefore we all know it won't be easy!
The good thing is that each change is incremental, there's no big bang, you just have to keep removing barriers, impediments and keep the budgets going.
It's continuous improvement, not revolution.
You're going to need help!
There's plenty of agile consultancies out there at the moment flooding the market, but fundamentally I think you need to look for experience and named resources to cover 3 fundamental areas; the organisational change, the delivery process and the engineering practices:
1. Experience of managing organisational and cultural change including the stakeholder communications, business case creation, and internal marketing. And be able to demonstrate the energy it requires. (regardless of if its agile or not).
2. Delivery management expertise, commonly Scrum is the predominant process adopted by agile teams. So look for Scrum Practitioners or Coaches with at least 5 years experience and references to back it up.
3. Engineering Practices - Extreme Programming expertise, automated tools usage, and deployment specialists... basically strong agile engineering experience - ex-Thoughtworkers and Conchango Devs are a good start.
With competence in these 3 areas, you won't go too far off track but do not underestimate the need for the Engineering Practices as it is fundamental to the quality of product and reducing cycles times to market.
And as with all change programmes... this will take months not weeks.
Steve Garnett 2010
On the one hand, following a period of intense change, budget spend and organisational upheaval... your department will have quicker cycle times to market, be more predictable operationally, produce higher quality software, have better working relationships with its customers and will be more adaptive to changes of business objectives and requirements.
On the other hand, all the department's problems that you know currently exist will become very visible and transparent very quickly.
All those skeletons in closets you've been dampening down, or battles you've been fighting to secure funding will rise to the top of agendas.
If you're looking for an easy ride or at least some calm seas, don't start agile.
Agile methodologies expose the weaknesses in your value stream of delivering software, it exposes poor infrastructure, asset management, governance, processes, delivery, and most fundamentally, it will expose weak people...
Agile not only highlights these problems, it rubs your face in it by reporting all the dirty linen as impediments and waste, and directly attributes slow delivery to the specific problem. These could include lack of testing environments, or poor VM performance, or production support interruptions, or no automated tests, or poor architecture etc, etc, etc.
Not only that, but if you walk this road, your department will start to judge you and the success of the agile initiative by your personal ability to secure funding and remove organisational impediments i.e. your executive skills.
So before you start down this road I think the first question for a CIO should be "Should building software be a core competency of this company?"
If the answer is no, then maybe the answer lies elsewhere in out-sourcing your software development to a good agile house. Forrester is a good start for compiling your short-list of agile companies such as Thoughtworks.
However, if there is a need for a strong software development capability because technology is fundamental to your business strategy, and the board of directors are in agreement, then agile is the best approach. This is because Agile development, specifically Extreme Programming, is one of the the most disciplined approaches to software development in the world.
So, let's assume you're a pro-active CIO/IT Director, with a supportive board behind you, ready for the challenge... Where do you start?
Fundamentally, you're initiating a change programme to completely overhaul the way your company builds software. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing anything less!
The change will affect everyone involved, your consumers, your internal customers, finance, marketing, HR, Operations and your own area.
Forget the Hype - Moving to Agile is a large organisational change programme that will overhaul your approach to software delivery.
Make no mistake, it's about people, its about change and therefore we all know it won't be easy!
The good thing is that each change is incremental, there's no big bang, you just have to keep removing barriers, impediments and keep the budgets going.
It's continuous improvement, not revolution.
You're going to need help!
There's plenty of agile consultancies out there at the moment flooding the market, but fundamentally I think you need to look for experience and named resources to cover 3 fundamental areas; the organisational change, the delivery process and the engineering practices:
1. Experience of managing organisational and cultural change including the stakeholder communications, business case creation, and internal marketing. And be able to demonstrate the energy it requires. (regardless of if its agile or not).
2. Delivery management expertise, commonly Scrum is the predominant process adopted by agile teams. So look for Scrum Practitioners or Coaches with at least 5 years experience and references to back it up.
3. Engineering Practices - Extreme Programming expertise, automated tools usage, and deployment specialists... basically strong agile engineering experience - ex-Thoughtworkers and Conchango Devs are a good start.
With competence in these 3 areas, you won't go too far off track but do not underestimate the need for the Engineering Practices as it is fundamental to the quality of product and reducing cycles times to market.
And as with all change programmes... this will take months not weeks.
"The propensity to exploit Agile delivery to achieve business success is directly proportional to the capacity of a company to change and continuously improve."
Steve Garnett 2010
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