New Whitepaper: The Big Picture Of Enterprise Agility

Readers of this blog are likely aware that effectively implementing software agility at the enterprise level is no small feat. Even for the fully committed department or enterprise, it can take six months to a year to introduce and master many of the basic agile practices and a number of additional years to achieve the productivity [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 3

As the title indicates, in the last two posts (Part 1 and Part 2 – and also be sure and check the comments from others) I’ve described the conundrum of organizing agile teams at scale, and said I’d provide some additional input from others along with some recommendations.
Should the Agile Enterprise Lean to the Feature [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 2

In my last post, I reintroduced this topic, describing the conundrum of organizing large number of agile teams to better address value delivery for new end user features and services. I described two basic approaches, feature teams and component teams, and some arguments for each.
I’m still waiting for some feedback from a couple of others [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 1

While continuing my work with a number of larger enterprises facing the cultural change, new practice adoption and organizational challenges of a large scale agile transformation, the topic has again come up as to how to organize large numbers of agile teams to effectively implement agile and optimize value stream delivery.
For the smaller software enterprise, [...]

Ten Suggested Practices for Applying Agile/Lean Software Management Principles to Other Knowledge Work

Introduction
Recently, I’ve been asked to help some teams apply lean/agile/Scrum/XP-like project management practices to non-software development knowledge work.
These organizations have seen agile methods produce huge benefits in visibility, productivity, quality, empowerment and motivation in their software teams. They naturally want to understand whether these techniques can be effective in other knowledge work activities such as [...]

Patterns and Anti-patterns in Enterprise Adoption

I gave this presentation to a SPIN meeting the other day and promised that I would post it. So here it is:
Patterns&Antipatterns in Enterprise Adoption
I’ve blogged on this topic before ( see post) but as agile continues to cross the chasm to the enterprise, new anti-patterns emerge (or perhaps they were always there and I just didn’t [...]

My Agile Executive Interview/Podcast

Recently. I was interviewed by Michael Cote, of the Agile Executive, to get my perspective on current issues, topics and strategies in enterprise agility. The interview does a pretty good job of exploring some of the larger issues in enterprise level adoption, including the best guidance I can provide on approaching the project office (or PMO) and how to address the [...]

Reaching the Agile Enterprise Tipping Point – A Workshop

Recently, I’ve been working with a number of large companies who are reaching the agile enterprise tipping point. In most cases the development teams or some outside agents have introduced agile as a potential solution to a host of problems – productivity, quality, time to market, whatever – but the managers and [...]

The Agile Enterprise Acid Test – Updated

In a prior post, I referred to a post by Paul Beavers of BMC (Is it Possible to be Half-Agile?) which gave his perspective on the agile acid test- the quintessential test of whether or not an organization is truly achieving agility at enterprise scale. In my post, I also provided my viewpoint on the [...]

Balancing Traditional and Agile Belief Systems- Israel Gat on the Equipoise of Agile

Recently I’ve again been pondering the balancing act of implementing new agile practices alongside extremely well entrenched, existing enterprise practices. While it’s always fun to criticize our past behaviors from the perspective of the rear view mirror, it’s also the fact that most of these prior practices actually worked dang pretty well pre-agile. After all, [...]