Agile for the Enterprise

In today's rapidly changing environment, organizations—both large and small—must quickly respond to shifting market requirements to remain competitive. To be successful, many are adopting agile development and continuous delivery methodologies to deliver software quickly, while keeping the quality and maintainability high. Several years ago the WebSphere Application Server development teams embarked on the journey from traditional waterfall development to agile. They are now expanding to use both agile and continuous delivery methodologies across their organization worldwide.

Information technology (IT) projects are notorious for exceeding budget and schedule estimates, and high visibility failures are common. IT projects in the public sector are particularly challenging. State, provincial, and federal governments worldwide have sponsored noteworthy disasters in the past twenty years. As agile methods have evolved, become more mainstream, and demonstrated their value in the private sector in the past decade, they are often cited as a remedy for the public sector’s IT misery.

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who successfully foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo.

It is widely understood that agile mitigates project execution risks. However, auditors and regulators unfamiliar with the agile process often reject it as non-compliant. In regulated industries, organizations seeking to adopt agile are often challenged to provide evidence that prescribed processes are being followed and can be evaluated to ensure adherence. This issue is compounded when auditors expect a more traditional, artifact-driven process, which, in an agile environment, does not necessarily mitigate the risks for which they were designed.

Agile has delivered impressive performance improvements at the project level, and some attempts to scale agile’s success to the IT project portfolio have also demonstrated good results. However, agile is not for all IT projects nor all project teams. Sometimes other approaches may be more appropriate. Can disparate approaches co-exist harmoniously in the same project portfolio? Can portfolio managers apply a flexible, “best-tool-for-the-job” approach, while simultaneously driving portfolio-wide adoption of disciplined, hyperproductive techniques?