Agile Trailblazers Blog

In order for an organization to be successful with Continuous Business Value Delivery® the organization has to set a new destination and has to create a “new” route to reach this destination. This means, we have to REVERSE ENGINEER the entire delivery process to maximize value creation at a rapid pace.

The three key areas that need to be lean and automated, the foundations of a Release Oriented organization are 3 major process areas:

• Enterprise Release Management
• Enterprise DevOps
• Lean Agile Portfolio Management

If you’re a CEO of a company, agile and scrum should be very familiar to you. If not, you run the risk of losing productivity and profit in your business. The top 3 challenges for CEOs who are driving change in their organizations to meet with shareholder expectations are:

• To prepare organizations to respond to market volatility
• To foster growth and innovation
• To develop human capital

Scrum is a framework comprised of roles, events, artifacts and rules along with a set of values to be lived by Scrum Teams. We have seen Scrum done well and, in many instances, Scrum not done so well. Here's our insights into some of the more common anti-patterns where many Scrum Teams lose the intent, and more importantly, the personal and business impacts that Scrum could bring to their teams and their organizations.

The first step is to get the organization aligned on a agile delivery cadence that is most appropriate depending on the type of business – more importantly the expectation from your end users. For example, if you are a bank, you would not want to bring down critical customer facing applications during peak business hours, for that matter any time during business hours. So not only do you have to pick your dates, you need to have a clear understand of exactly when during the day you would authorize a release to production. Now, imagine that you have multiple initiatives that you have organized into “project containers”. You have to now release these projects into the production environment in an organized manner, complete with the ability to rollback etc.

We are happy to announce that Naeem and Brian will be speaking at CD Summit on Wednesday, November 19th. Our session is called "Realizing Continuous Delivery: From Startups to Large Enterprises" - so take a look!

The third foundation –Agile Enterprise Portfolio Management– A lean project funding and tracking process that ensures Just In Time funding of ideas, so that the rest of the machinery can deliver the value at a rapid pace. In traditional organizations, budgeting and pre-planning ideas for the long term and short term – many a times put the organization in a position to not pick up and work on ideas that are demanded by the market because the internal processes of the companies do not aid the company to be agile and nimble to react to market conditions. So, while your development organization may have adopted agile delivery processes, it does not truly help if your project intake process is still stuck in the 60’s.

As experienced leaders, we expect that our managers and executives trust us as well as give us autonomy in decision-making. Some call this empowerment. The secret for this empowerment begins with trust.

Inspired at @gwu @uchicago

Ever tried getting a recipe book and recreating your favorite dish made by your favorite chef? You have followed all the instructions, gotten the right ingredients, and channeled your inner Emeril, but the dish still does not come out a 5-star meal. What has this got to do with agile transformation? Read on.