The Agile Enterprise: Applying Agile Principles to Drive Organizational Success
Introduction
Agility is the Holy Grail for today’s corporations. Sleek, speedy, nimble, and athletic—who doesn’t want that? That’s why most CEOs boast about leading agile companies. Sadly, even though a CEO sees her business as an agile panther in the jungle, in most cases, it’s more likely a clumsy, lumbering elephant, crashing into obstacles instead of adroitly avoiding them.
The term Agile comes from software development, where teams achieve success by undertaking small batches of work and fully completing them rather than engaging in months-long entire systems design sessions. I came of professional age before anyone boasted about corporate agility and before Agile became formalized as a software development philosophy. During these ancient times, I experienced my first brush with Agile when I was a few years out of college in 1988.
Under the eminently sensible guidance of my beloved mentor, Jim, we did Agile development before there was Agile development. The subsequent popularization of Agile and Agile methodologies provided me the vocabulary, like sprints and iterations, to describe my early work at the ONR. The most interesting aspect of the experience was its naturalness. Jim and I fell into an efficient work partnership, with no special tools or methodologies to guide us.
I imagine the software luminaries who produced the Agile Manifesto a decade later were guided by the same principles Jim and I practiced. They merely formalized a set of ideas they were already following that seemed like old-fashioned common sense. One of the key ideas in the Agile Manifesto is the suggestion to tackle large problems by breaking them into small, more easily accomplishable pieces. Finding large problems needing decomposition requires no imagination when real-life problems are ubiquitous.
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