Analyst Watch: Companies must embrace holistic change to achieve agile results
By Diego Lo Giudice
August 22, 2012 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Software has fundamentally changed the way that companies deliver new products and services, explore new channels, and interact with empowered customers. In fact, 81% of business leaders recently surveyed by Forrester believe that technology is a central element of their business model. Software is essential to even being in the game, and to make a difference, it has to be more competitive and innovative.
Agile and lean promise greater flexibility, higher quality and increased velocity than traditional approaches. Agile is popular for development teams, but in order to get benefits across the organization, something more fundamental is required: holistic change—a transformation to processes, organizational models, development practices, tools and architecture.
In Forrester’s Agile and Lean Playbook, my colleagues and I maintain that it is critical for companies to define and execute a holistic change strategy based on a five-step framework in order to realize agile benefits and success.
Step 1: Appoint a smart change leader to adopt and scale agile. Being responsible for the change program is a daunting task. The change leader is responsible for defining and continuously selling the transformation program to his or her peers, ensuring that top executives are standing behind the transformation initiative, and convincing teams around the organization to proactively collaborate in the program. In the first 90 days of transformation, the change leader should build a work plan that defines metrics for the transformation program, actively shifts the focus to value, and provides a complete overview of the program’s role, vision, mission, contributions and deliverables.
Step 2: Adopt lean principles for your program, but adapt them to company culture. The success of a transformation to agile and lean depends on how fast and well the organization buys into agile and lean values and principles. Lean can be seen as the foundation for agile, as the principles explain why agile works and help measure whether agile practices are helping you move in the right direction.
It is critical that the organization deeply understands lean principles and decides which it will adopt and in what order: 1) eliminate waste (add nothing but value); 2) respect people; 3) build quality in; 4) optimize the whole, not the parts; 5) create knowledge (focus on learning); 6) deliver fast; and 7) defer commitment. By considering the culture of the organization, it will be possible to focus on a set of principles that make sense.
Related Search Term(s): agile
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