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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Enterprise Agility is practical framework for enhancing Agility and equipping your company with the tools to survive.
Key Features Prepare your company to navigate the rapidly-moving business world Enhance Agility in every component of your organization Build a framework that meets the unique requirements of your enterpriseBook Description
The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment.
Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively.
Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
What you will learnDrive agility-oriented change across the enterpriseUnderstand why agility matters (more than ever) to modern enterprises Adopt and influence an Agile mindset in your teams and in your organization Understand the concept of a CAS and how to model enterprise and leadership behaviors on CAS characteristics to enhance enterprise agility Understand and convey the differences between Agile and true enterprise agility Create an enterprise-specific action plan to enhance agility Become a champion for enterprise agilityRecognize the advantages and challenges of distributed teams, and how Agile ways of working can remedy the rough spotsEnable and motivate your IT partners to adopt Agile ways of workingWho this book is for
Enterprise Agility is a tool for anyone with the motivation to influence outcomes in an enterprise, who aspires to improve Agility. Readers from the following backgrounds will benefit: chief executive officer, chief information officer, people/human resource director, information technology director, head of change program, head of transformation, and Agile coach/consultant.
Sunil Mundra is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks with decades of experience consulting, working with some of the world's largest enterprises. He has helped organizations tackle their most urgent business challenges and has worked with senior executives to shape and execute their roadmap for change. ThoughtWorks is a global software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals. Our teams think disruptively to deliver empowering technology that addresses clients' toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change.
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Seitenzahl: 581
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Enterprise Agility
Enterprise Agility
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
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First published: June 2018
Production reference: 1270618
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ISBN 978-1-78899-064-6
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I dedicate this book to my wife Samta for her unconditional support and for the sacrifices she has made for the sake of my career.
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Forewords
I'm a complex adaptive system. So are you. Every organization we have ever been a part of, including our families, are also complex adaptive systems. I have been talking about the properties of complex adaptive systems for years, and I have been yearning for a reference that would not only bring out the considerable theory of these fascinating systems but would also tie it to agile development. Now, I am happy to be able to point you, dear reader, and everyone else, who wants to know the bigger, broader story of agile, to this book that Sunil Mundra has written. He has done an excellent job of making what could be a difficult subject easy for all of us to understand and apply.
It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that we can understand both ourselves and the environments in which we function. This is why I'm always suspicious of anyone who tries to explain the history of anything in a neat story. The truth is, we have been sold a bill of goods by teachers and philosophers. The pig in a poke we bought without hesitation is that things are modular, made up of pieces with clean interfaces, easily identified, easily extracted, and easily combined. Understanding these components leads to an understanding of the whole. It seems so obvious. It seems so right. But it was so wrong. It led us to take a simplistic view of change—both personal and organizational. We thought we could simply apply enough force and voila the result would appear. If we only had enough power, we could literally move mountains. No wonder all our change efforts failed!
Part of the reason for this mechanistic thinking that we now struggle to undo is the work of Frederick Taylor and his "scientific management." His contribution is often denigrated, but I believe we should celebrate his efforts. He was a well-intentioned, intelligent thinker who tried to bring what was at that time a new methodical approach to the workplace. He experimented. He measured. He learned. Sounds agile to me! I have the same reaction to those who disparage "waterfall." First, the current, incorrect, linear interpretation of Royce's original paper has caused the same disparaging of his work. For those careful readers of his article, the true meaning, an iterative solution to the then chaos that surrounded software development, will unfold.
It wasn't that far removed from where we are today and was certainly a very good step in the right direction. A dose of humility, realizing that we all are products of our environments and can only see what we can see, would serve us well. It's too easy to see the problems of the past and too difficult to see our current dilemmas. An ancient text admonishes, "How can you say to your brother or sister, 'Brother, Sister, let me take the splinter out of your eye,' when you don't see the log in your own eye?"
Fortunately for you, dear reader, Sunil doesn't take the high ground but, step by step, leads us forward, building on the great contributions of the past. And so on to what I consider the "heart" of the book—the discussion of complex adaptive systems. CAS for the rest of us! A CAS is well-named. There is nothing simple about it. The components, their interactions, the resulting, emergent behavior. It may be too much for our limited understanding, but the direction is clear, we have to begin to adopt this model if we are to survive.
As Sunil points out, this notion has been with us, in some form, from the beginning. We may not have applied it consciously, but it has been the key to our survival in a changing world. It is the answer to many of the big questions. How did we get here? How can we face our current reality? How can we get better? The answer is close to miraculous. It's exactly what we need. It's not prescriptive, it's adaptive. It's not stuck in the past, it's always about learning and improving. It's not about reaching a goal and relaxing, it's about always, always, always reaching and moving forward. The label "agile" insists on being applied.
The image of butterflies, so delicate and beautiful, helps us understand this. I'm a musician and occasionally play in a small ensemble for our local hospice organization. In the spring, a very special event honors those who have passed on during the previous year. It's a butterfly release. Families who have lost loved ones are given a small box that contains a butterfly. They stand with heads bowed, shoulders down, holding each other, deep in sad remembering. After a short service (with music from my group), each family opens its box and holds a drowsy butterfly briefly before it opens its wings and soars upward. The metaphor is stunning. What seems to be dead is alive. Regardless of your religious beliefs (and hospice espouses none), we all crave that feeling of hope in a time of despair. The feelings spread throughout the crowd as the butterflies appear overhead. The system has changed. People are now looking up, raising their hands, smiling, chattering to each other. What caused this? The butterflies? Some deep instinct in all of us for survival in difficult times? The beautiful spring morning and our love of being outside with flowers and others close to us? It's a system. It's a complex adaptive system that responds to small changes in the environment.
Those small changes change everything. It's wonderful to see that shift. This is the essence of our story, so we should pay attention. The larger system is sensitive to even the slightest probe. If we stand back, nudge, observe, and learn, that will lead us home.
This "probe, sense, respond" framework is often called "small experiments" by the agile community. Small, simple, fast, frugal, safe-to-fail "lever points" are the stepping stones in a fearless change journey. As Sunil points out (he has probably read Fearless Change and More Fearless Change) this is the secret to any kind of change—technical, organizational, cultural—small steps based on safe-to-fail experiments. I don't know how many times I have heard an intelligent, thoughtful executive declare: our organization will be agile by June! This sense that we can shove systems around, that all it takes is determination and incentives, is an unfortunate, widespread misunderstanding of systems theory. We often consider upheaval in the past as being a single event. It doesn't matter whether it's an uprising or an invasion, we somehow see it as an overnight phenomenon, when it took years of baby steps. Close examination of any significant historical event will reveal an intricate pattern of small efforts, some failures, with overall progress in a direction that eventually led to the attention-getting occurrence.
What can we learn from all this? In his instructive section Implications for enterprises, Sunil offers us concrete suggestions that we can all use to better understand how we and our organizations change, learn, and grow. The key is resilience, a technical term in psychology that refers to the ability we all have, to some degree, to recover from difficult times. It seems to be the defining characteristic, more so than the actual circumstances or genetic qualities of an individual. For those who are resilient, the world is less daunting. The good news is that, like many other important attributes, it can be learned. That's not only true for individuals, it's also true for organizations. That's the good news. And for you, dear reader, that's hope. We are lucky to have discovered Sunil's handbook. We are lucky that he has taken the time to document his wisdom, and, finally, we are lucky that we have resolved to apply it and get better.
Dr Linda Rising
Co-author of Fearless Change and More Fearless Change
As I pored over the manuscript of this book at a coffee shop near my home, I could see the big "Going Out of Business" banner in the window of the store across the road—Carson's. This American chain of department stores was established 160 years ago, not so long after the first industrial revolution. It survived two world wars, the big depression, mass automation and scaling in manufacturing. But it couldn't survive the information age; it recently filed for bankruptcy.
Carson's story is depressingly familiar. Its 50 stores are but a small fraction of the estimated 2,500 stores being shuttered across the US retail sector this year. And that's on the back of 5,000 stores closed in 2017. The shift to e-commerce and online retail has resulted in a perilous decline in foot traffic at malls up and down the country.
Reflecting on the closing sign, as I sipped my coffee, I wondered if the leadership team at Carson's would echo what the Nokia CEO said, as he announced his firm was being acquired by Microsoft: "We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost." Such sentiments would probably resonate with Kodak, Borders, Blockbusters and other companies crushed by the digital age.
Like it or not, we live in an age of rapid changes, and the pace of change is still accelerating.
Take a look at what's happening at our biggest companies. According to a 2016 study, in 1965 the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 was 33 years; by 1990, it was 20 years. By 2026, it's forecast to be just 14 years. To put that in context, it means around half of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years.
At the heart of this disruption are digital technologies. The rapidly decreasing cost of computing, storage and data transfer are creating network effects driving the growth of even more exciting technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, voice/facial recognition, natural language processing, and self-driving vehicles, just to name a few.
But we are not fine-tuned to deal with accelerating changes. The majority of the human history has been defined by linear and incremental changes. Even today, our organizational designs and management theories are based on a relatively stable and consistent environment, where certain competitive advantages can be protected for decades.
That's not to say that our preferred state is complete stasis. Every enterprise has some level of agility and can deal with gradual changes. But in an era of accelerating change, enterprises need to be more agile than ever before: agility is becoming as important as, if not more than, vision and strategy.
There have been some successful attempts bring more agility to various industries—notably Lean Manufacturing and Agile Software Development. But scaling Agile to the entire enterprise, regardless of function, unit and geography, remains the business world's greatest challenge.
Many books have tried to address enterprise agility at scale, mostly from a component perspective—technology, process, people, culture, and so on. But in trying to encapsulate Agile practices, some of these titles given the mistaken impression that there can be a one-size-fit-all solution. The danger of such an approach is that enterprises jump on the Agile adoption bandwagon without truly understanding how to derive value from Agile.
This book brings a fresh perspective to scaling Agile at the enterprise level. Sunil's favorite metaphor compares an organization with a human body, and agility with health. The first implication is that it's not about "doing" Agile (as doing health), but more about "being" Agile (as being healthy). Being Agile stems from the organization's mindset, culture and leadership behaviors, rather than anything mechanistic.
The second implication is that Agile is less about transformation from state X to state Y; it's about continuous improvement, becoming a learning organization. Every organization is unique in certain ways. Agility also means something different from organization to organization. Sunil distilled his observations on Agile teams (both successful ones and unsuccessful ones) in different context into patterns (enablers to agility) and anti-patterns (inhibitors to agility). While they are organized through six different categories—organizational structure, process, people, technology, governance, and customer—for easier navigation and mental model building, they are never meant to be a catalog of tools to be applied separately.
If you want a cookie-cutter style roadmap for Agile, this is not the book for you. Instead, what Sunil's provided is a framework to enable you to create your own roadmap, one that's tailored to your own unique organization and situation. This book guides you through assessments you can undertake to identify the inhibitors to agility, as well as enablers you can introduce to enhance agility. It helps you plan for change based on your own business context, to prioritize and execute. Working with CEOs and senior business leaders, I am often asked questions like: "Should I copy the Spotify Squad framework?" (or whichever the latest "success story"). I am glad that I can now offer Sunil's book illustrating the path to a customized roadmap through understanding patterns and anti-patterns.
Sunil has years of experience of working closely with Agile teams in large organizations, and he's used that wealth of knowledge and learning from the coalface to produce a book that offers practical advice and encouragement.
We all know that the next two decades promise to be more challenging than ever, as the pace of technological advance increases. And we can't promise that Carson's, Nokia and Kodak will be the last companies to be caught out by the pace of change. But I wholeheartedly believe that those business leaders that follow the advice laid out in Sunil's book—and embrace Enterprise Agility as a core competence—will be well placed to thrive in this hyper-competitive environment.
Guo Xiao
CEO, ThoughtWorks
Endorsements
Sunil Mundra's book displays his deep practitioner experience in developing agility in organizations across the world. It highlights the many challenges we face in organizations today in a systematic approach and then helps you develop a strategy for agility with an organic and human approach. Sunil is a master in change and one of the brightest minds I've worked with. It takes years of experience and great mastery to distil complex knowledge in this way. This is a must-read book if you want to learn about real world agility.
João Cardoso
Head of Digital, GroupM Portugal
With this book, Sunil Mundra has created the must have handbook for enterprise leaders today. He has elegantly articulated what it means for an enterprise to truly anticipate, adapt and respond to change. One of the smartest and most humble consultants I've worked with.
Christopher Carydias
Founder & CEO, Lexicon Digital
I found myself continually nodding throughout reading this book, recognizing many of the behaviors or characteristics in the organizations I've worked through within my career. What I found most useful was the clear and rounded descriptions of why that was the case and clear suggestions of how to address them. The book offers a comprehensive view of how an Agile organization should operate and through the use of examples and diagrams guides you through how these elements come together. A must read for anyone involved in or starting a digital transformation. I would suspect even if you are "transformed" you will take some valuable tips from reading this book.
Kathryn Chase
Head of Digital Agility, Shop Direct
We are at the precipice of a digitization revolution and can assume that anything procedural will be automated and what would be left for humans to do would require a higher degree of creative and analytical input. Each knowledge worker of tomorrow would be a "craftsman."
Through this well compiled work of his, Sunil has highlighted the need for agility to be treated at par with the need for having a sound business vision. The treatment of an enterprise like a human body rather than a machine and the need for focus on "being agile" versus "doing agile," helps bring out a very fundamental need of transformation initiatives to be much more intrinsic and holistic rather than following a cookie cutter approach. Based on his extensive delivery and consulting experience, he has been able to substantiate his ideas using simple but effective terms like "T-shaped skills" and watermelon metrics.
This book approaches the complex topic of enterprise agility in a refreshing way – looking at the concept top down, provide a framework for implementation with a set of cross functional ideas across industries but stops short of providing dogmatic recommendations.
All in all, a must read for all "thinking" leaders who are driving or are about to drive large scale transformation initiatives!
Ashwin Dugar
Director – Information Technology of a leading European Bank
Sunil provides clarity and insight in how to embrace enterprise agility in a pragmatic and thoughtful way. In fact, I'd go as far to say I've never met anyone so passionate about enterprise agility in all my travels! In Enterprise Agility: Being Agile in a Changing World there is an emphasis on what it means "being" agile rather than just "doing" agile based on years of hard-learned lessons and diverse experience across numerous organizations and geographies. This is an important book that goes to the heart of what enterprise agility means from an organizational culture and leadership perspective, not just how to follow an agile process.
What I found really useful is that Sunil provides practical and principled advice and perspectives on how to take action to succeed in enterprise agility adoption from lessons learnt over many years. This is based on a foundation of real-world experience dealing with the enterprise as a living system, the importance of mindsets and culture, and the critical role that leadership has to play.
Peter How
Co-Founder & Director at Decida Digital Pty Ltd
I have known Sunil over the last 19 years and can attest that he delves deep into the founding principles of the domain he is engaged with. This book is an important marker reflecting his ability to connect the dots of his rich and varied experiences with a rigorous theoretical analysis.
Business history is replete with examples of successful companies thinking about problems differently, reasoning out solutions and then defining the process for delivering efficiently the solution. But with time, the process gains more importance and soon the form gets confused with function.
Sunil expertly differentiates between Being Agile and Doing Agile. He draws out this distinction with his own experience in product companies in highly dynamic markets, his grounding in agile methodologies and rich consulting experience in guiding teams to adapt.
We could read this book and restrict ourselves to understanding the need for an organization to be agile, but that would be our failing. Sunil is alerting us to a world in which organization mortality is rapidly increasing due to the inability to truly understand the changes and the actions required to cope and meet it. This book reinforces Descartes's "I think therefore I am" existential challenge for the 21st century world.
Ramaswamy Iyer
Founder and CEO, Vayana Network
An invaluable source for leaders on a quest to transform their enterprises to stay relevant and lead the charge during the bleeding edge of fourth industrial revolution where ability to change at break neck speed is the new currency for success. Sunil skillfully illustrated how to transition from Agile to agility at scale and sustain it to continuously delight customers.
Rash Khan
Global Leader, Digital Sales & Marketing Platforms, IBM CIO
Enterprise Agility provides key insights in a clear, structured and thorough way into the various aspects of facilitating a higher level of agility across the enterprise, and why this is key. Organizational change is complex. This book based on the vast field experience of the author helps executives better understand the barriers in important and complex domains such as mindset and culture, leadership, organization, governance. It also helps bridge the knowledge gap we too often see in the agile coaching practice and thereby forms an important contribution to the agile literature.
Adrian Lander
Lead Agile Enterprise Transformation Coach and Executive Coach, AgiLive Asia
Co-founder of Agnostic Agile
In Enterprise Agility: Being Agile in a Changing World, Sunil Mudra has collected his wide breadth and depth of research and knowledge with his experiences of applying what he's learned into a comprehensive compendium of what it takes to gain true enterprise agility. He challenges the mechanistic, compartmentalized view of organizations seeking predictability and stability, with a more clear-eyed view of the organic, complexity-ridden organizational organism made of living parts. And gives us the leavening of humor along the way.
Sunil sees and describes the inhibitors that lead to enterprise destruction as well as offering the enablers that lead to a successful, productive future. Simultaneously providing practical (and difficult) steps to custom fit for purpose, he also offers readers the hope of true enterprise agility—where learning leads to resilience, diligent attention leads to high performance, and people at every level of the enterprise thrive along with the business outcomes.
Diana Larsen
Co-founder, Agile Fluency Project LLC
Co-founder, Futureworks Consulting LLCCo-author, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning; and The Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile.
By changing the metaphor for business structure, from mechanistic to organic, Sunil provides the reader with a clear vision of how an agile organization operates and thrives in an unpredictable market. The practical tips, clear case studies, and transformation guidance are a great addition to the wider enterprise agile body of knowledge. Drawing on his personal experiences and the history of software agility, this book is a must read for anyone looking to expand agile from their IT functions across the enterprise.
Evan Leybourn
Founder and CEO, Business Agility Institute
Sunil brings his wealth of experience in a series of thought provoking ideas on enterprise wide agility. His primary message is agility is urgent and is a mandate, not an option. He drives this hard with multiple examples. He defines agile transformation versus agility and insightfully shows that transformation has a destination while agility is a journey.
With this introduction, he forays into the way of getting this on the ground. Aptly he starts with the organizational design and shows how the knowledge economy is structured as complex adaptive systems (CAS). He illustrates that CAS is a feedback driven, self-learning setup at its core. These organizations work as living organisms where the overall system works as a unit. He goes to show that these have an altogether different mindset, culture and leadership. He defines these terms which makes the reader think and apply to their own context.
Having laid the foundation, he lays down various components like process, people, governance and technology, and some finer points on managing change. Across the book he deals how each component inhibits agility and how to overcome. Each chapter has significant experiential aspects inbuilt that makes a reader compare with reality and reflect.
It is one of the fine balanced book on agility. It is neither too skewed on people, nor on methodology, nor on processes. For any serious learner on agile who would like to get a 360 view of agile transformation, I would recommend this book
R. Mosesraj
CIO and Head of Excellence, Brillio
This book highlights a point that is often made but seldom internalized by those who lead transformation efforts: that organizations are living systems, not machines. Therefore, transformation plans need to account for feedback during the process. One can only paint a vague outline of phase two before phase one concludes. From this starting point, Sunil goes on to provide a useful compendium of recent thinking on various dimensions of enterprise agility.
Sriram Narayan
Author of Agile IT Organization Design, ThoughtWorks
Sunil Mundra's book is not so much a roadmap for business leaders as it is a real-time, interactive GPS that will guide them around traffic jams and onto the fastest routes to their destinations.
To accomplish that, he provides a sophisticated and insightful review of the vast literature on organizational agility, brings it to life with well-chosen case examples, and, most importantly, provides a thoughtful, well-developed framework for leaders. His use of the Complex Adaptive Systems model as the basic building block for his analysis allows him to employ the best findings from the literature of organization theory and change to elaborate a comprehensive model of effective organizational functioning.
Any CEO, division manager or entrepreneur working in a fast-paced industry environment who ignores the inhibitors and enablers to agility embedded in Sunil's analysis does so at their own peril.
Edward J. Ottensmeyer, Ph.D.
Dean Emeritus, Graduate School of Management, Clark University, USA
Sunil Mundra's Enterprise Agility is one of the best books to guide professionals through the process of enhancing agility—with his extensive personal experience in the field, Sunil shares his knowledge while taking into consideration the complexity of organizations due to the human element which plays such an integral role in any transition and transformation in a simple and easy-to-understand manner.
This book is a treasure which encompasses all we need to know about agility.
Chiranya Prachaseri
Chief Executive Officer - Southeast Asia Cryoviva (Thailand) Ltd.
(An Indorama Ventures/RJ Corp promoted Company)
Sunil Mundra has raised a question which exists in deep subconsciousness of all leaders of large enterprises—how to transform our organizations in order to be able to compete in modern day society; a society characterized by high information availability, fast spread of information, fickle minded customers demanding personalization and ready to switch loyalties quickly. The cycle time needed to respond to market dynamics is decreasing rapidly and large enterprises are finding extremely difficult to complete in this market place. The problem is real for now and is staring at our faces. This book creates an intellectual curiosity about this issue and forces us to think. The book is very timely as all big and small enterprise leaders, CEO's and visionaries must tackle this question in the next 5 years. The author has further extended the concepts of Agile software development to be applied to deal with this situation.
Madhur Saxena
Vice President, A large multinational technology company
This book is a distilled synthesis of Sunil' practical experience across domains and his build-up and exploration of the theoretical constructs of a very contemporary discourse. This "labor-of-love" work from Sunil forces contemplation and introspection, and hopefully can help you challenge the set fundamentals of your business operations.
Raj Swaminathan
CEO, Indus Software Technologies
Sunil Mundra has written a must-read book about profound challenges enterprises are facing today. Sunil shares his knowledge, practical experience and convictions. Comprehensive, focused and inspiring. Learn from one of the best consultants, I have ever worked with.
Thierry Thibault
CEO, Societe Generale Insurance Germany
Sunil has done a fabulous job of putting together a compelling case for Enterprise Agility. Unlike dozens of books that simply latch on to commercial frameworks to argue their case, Sunil's approach is practically devoid of prescriptive frameworks, and comes as fresh air. He gradually and systematically builds his case. Starting with why do we need it in the first place, he goes on to deconstruct its foundational elements of enterprises as living systems, mindset and culture, and finally the leadership. It is critical that business leaders understand that their organization's lack of agility is not simply because of not having the latest agile process but because of more fundamental organizational challenges, most of which happen to be self-inflicted, with the leadership being rightly held responsible for all such ills!
Tathagat Varma
Country Head and General Manager, ChinaSoft International
If you feel it is time to re-inject agility into your organization ... it is time to read this book. Sunil penned down thought-provoking facts that have long swirled around the minds of those involved in leadership and transformational roles. How do we continue down the complexities of a continuous improvement path while at the same time influence the minds and hearts of our broader audience?
Every reader will find much to stimulate their thinking in this book. The encouraging nature of Sunil's arguments and the variety of angles explored will provoke both thought and emotion.
Sunil homes in on personal traits and behavioral capabilities of leaders. Understanding the significance of mindset and culture is critical to influencing a workforce to see a new future. Maybe one of the most missed opportunities in our understanding of agility at the enterprise level is the courage and convictions of our leaders.
This book will have an impressive impact and become an important source for fundamentalists, novices and executives alike, gaining greater understanding and support for agility in transforming organizations.
Marianne Vosloo
CIO and National Manager for Technology & Innovation, Australian Federal Police
Contributors
About the author
Sunil Mundra is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks with decades of experience consulting, working with some of the world's largest enterprises. He has helped organizations tackle their most urgent business challenges and has worked with senior executives to shape and execute their roadmap for change.
ThoughtWorks (www.thoughtworks.com) is a global software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals. Our teams think disruptively to deliver empowering technology that addresses clients' toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change.
I have a lot of people to thank for their role in the highly fulfilling but tough initiative of writing this book. First, I want to thank my entire family, especially my parents, my wife Samta and my daughter Shreya for their constant encouragement and support. It means a lot to me to see the pride in their eyes, as I became a publishing author.
Next, I wish to thank the leadership and my colleagues at ThoughtWorks in India and across the globe. It is only due to their wholehearted help, encouragement, and support that I gained the courage to think about writing a book and then take it to completion. The number of people who have helped me, directly and indirectly, are far too many to name specifically. However, a few names stand out as first among equals. Neal Ford played a key role in inspiring me, as he was the first to suggest that I write a book, about six years ago. Jean-Marc (JM) Domaingue, was a solid pillar of support right from the time I put pen to paper and always made time to give feedback on raw content. Gary O'Brien gave me candid advice on how I should go about building the narrative of the book. I also wish to thank Guo Xiao for graciously agreeing to write one of the two forewords for the book.
I wish to thank Dr. Linda Rising, a globally renowned thought leader, for writing an insightful foreword, and for agreeing to do so despite having an extremely busy calendar.
I am grateful to all those who wrote the endorsements for the book. These people are senior corporate and thought leaders and they have spared their valuable time to read the imperfect manuscript and write the endorsements. Thank you, João Cardoso, Christopher Carydias, Kathryn Chase, Ashwin Dugar, Peter How, Ramaswamy Iyer, Rash Khan, Adrian Lander, Diana Larsen, Evan Leybourn, R. Mosesraj, Edward J. Ottensmeyer, Chiranya Prachaseri, Sriram Narayan, Madhur Saxena, Raj Swaminathan, Thierry Thibault, Tathagat Varma and Marianne Vosloo. Your endorsements have enhanced the credibility of the book.
I wish to thank Chandra Srivastava for the important role she played in shaping the contents of the book. She was the first person to review each chapter, leveraging her Agile expertise and experience. Her validation and feedback gave me the confidence that the content was ready to be submitted to the publisher. I also owe my thanks to my friends and ex-colleagues, for providing critiques, which helped to improve the contents of the book.
My sincere thanks to Packt Publishing for partnering with me to make this book a reality. I was pleasantly surprised that they work in an Agile way: they had me deliver the content incrementally and iteratively, which helped me to constantly remain focused on my deliverables. My special thanks to Ben Renow-Clarke, Acquisitions Managing Editor, Radhika Atitkar and her predecessor Savvy Sequeira, Project Editor, Joanne Lovell, Development Editor and Bhagyashree Rai, Technical Editor for their responsiveness and support. I also wish thank Allan Kelly, whom Packt engaged as the Technical Reviewer for the book. His reviews were very helpful as he pointed out a few "blind spots" in the content.
Lastly, I wish to thank all my friends and well-wishers for keeping me inspired throughout this exciting journey to becoming an author.
About the reviewer
Allan Kelly inspires, educates, and advises teams and executives creating digital products. He helps companies large and small enhance their agility and boost their digital offering. He has over 20 years software engineering experience and has spent the last 10 years advising companies and teams on agile and digital strategy. Clients include: Virgin Atlantic, Qualcomm, The Bank of England, lastminue.com, Reed Elsevier, Fugro N.V. and West Midland Fire Service.
He is the originator of Value Poker, Time-Value Profiles and Retrospective Dialogue Sheets. Allan is the author of the perennial essay: Dear Customer: The Truth about IT Projects and several books, including: Xanpan: Team Centric Agile Software Development and Business Patterns for Software Developers. His latest book is Continuous Digital: An agile alternative to projects for digital business. His blog is at https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/blog/ and on Twitter he is @allankellynet.
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Preface
The challenge of fast-paced change
One of the biggest challenge enterprises are facing today is how to deal with disruptions arising from fast-paced change. This change is largely driven by technological innovations, to the extent that it's forcing enterprises in every sector to put technology at the core of their respective businesses. The change is so disruptive and fast that no enterprise—regardless of its age or size—can take its survival for granted.
My hypothesis is that enterprises are struggling to deal with change as they are modeled as mechanistic systems, that is, to optimize predictability and stability. An enterprise that is modeled for this will inevitably struggle to deal with fast-paced change. I believe that enterprises must be infused with "life" in order to not just deal but also leverage the changing environment for their benefit.
Agility is a necessity
I am a passionate believer in the need for agility (the use of noncapital "a"; in agility is deliberate as it's a capability and not a noun) at the enterprise level. Being an evangelist for enterprise agility, I believe that it's the only agility that will enable enterprises not only to deal with a fast changing environment, but more importantly to leverage change for competitive advantage and customer delight. The reason I say this with full conviction is that, in my opinion, this is the common attribute of enterprises that are successfully dealing with and/or leveraging change, be it large corporations such as Google and Amazon or newer start-ups such as Uber and Tesla, which are causing widespread disruptions. My conviction is validated not only by the virtue of me being a part of an organization— ThoughtWorks—which has achieved a mature and sustainable level of agility across the globe
My sentiment about agility is aligned with what Jim Highsmith, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, has said: "Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment." (http://jimhighsmith.com/what-is-agility/)
It is an indisputable fact that the Agile Manifesto and its twelve Principles were abstracted from the methodologies such as Scrum, XP, and DSDM, which were being used to overcome software-delivery-related problems. However, I am very sure that the Agile Manifesto signatories intended the outcome to be agility, and not just following Agile as a methodology. This difference is extremely significant and goes beyond nuances of grammar. It's about "being" Agile: having agility versus "doing" Agile.
While I will deal with the issue of Agile versus agility at length in the core of the book, my hypothesis is that most Agile Transformations initiated—by adopting Agile at enterprise level—have met with limited success because the focus has been on "doing" rather than on "being" Agile. Compared with Agile, agility is a very different ballgame. This is because it's intrinsic in nature and so applies to the whole and not to just one or more parts of the whole. To give an analogy, "doing" Agile is akin to mechanically lifting weights to strengthen the arms, and "being" Agile is about aligning the physical body, mind, and emotions to improve the holistic health of a person. Sure, it may need to include lifting weights to strengthen the arms, but it may also include overarching things such as giving up smoking, practicing meditation, and improving work-life balance.
My experience and reading suggests that leaders who have taken their enterprises down the Agile Transformation path have often found that achieving enterprise agility is hard, scary, and painful. Moreover, the illusion that agility can be achieved merely based on scaling Agile practices and processes across teams is not helping the cause at all. Unless the enterprise achieves real agility, the benefits gained from "doing" Agile will at best be very limited and will most likely regress the concerned parts of the enterprise to their original dysfunctional state.
It's therefore not surprising that leaders of such enterprises are unable to see the full potential of agility, and at times, have actually lost faith in it. On the other hand, leaders who have had the courage, conviction, and persistence to transform the enterprise and themselves as well, have experienced incredible outcomes.
Goal of the book
My goal through this book is to highlight that the approach to enterprise agility must be based on treating the enterprise like a living system, say a human body, rather than treating it like a machine, such as a car. When a machine slows down or breaks, the relevant part of the machine can be fi xed or even replaced. However, if the overall health of a human being is not good, it can rarely be cured by just fi xing a specific part or parts of the body.
This book is about improving the enterprise's health and is not just about fixing something which is broken and localized, say a fractured leg. The key message that I wish to convey is that enterprise agility is not about making the parts Agile and then adding it up—working on each part separately. The human body analogy will be to improve agility in hands, legs, head, eyes, and so on, to hope that the overall health will improve. It may also involve diet, exercise, and stress management, which result in the holistic wellbeing of a person.
Optimal functioning of human organs does not imply overall good health, but at the same time good health needs all organs to function well. Similarly, to achieve optimal agility at the enterprise level, the components of the enterprise—people, processes, structure, governance, technology, and customers (yes, I consider the customer to be an integral component of the enterprise!)—must be enabled and leveraged for greater agility. Hence, in the book I have approached enterprise agility from both holistic and component level perspectives.
Moreover, just like the meaning of good health is specific to an individual, what "good" agility is will be specific to the enterprise. Hence, enterprises must create an action plan to enhance and sustain agility based on their respective context. As in case of health, there are patterns that are known to inhibit and enhance agility. I have shared some patterns in the book, which enterprises can use as pointers for creating the action plan.
I am also passionate about sharing my knowledge, and this, along with my conviction about and belief in the power of agility are the key drivers for me to write this book. Being in ThoughtWorks, which has groomed and nurtured many well-known thought leaders, I harbored self-doubts about being an author and thereby potentially being compared with these great thought leaders.
However, my ex-colleague and now a good friend Matthew Stratford put things in perspective. He said, "Not every guitarist can be Jimmy Hendrix, but they can still make music which at least some people will like." I have drawn inspiration from this statement throughout this tough but highly fulfilling journey.
Value and limitations of the book
In an era where information on literally any topic can be "Googled," I initially wondered whether it was worth writing this book. However, the realization that my perspectives on agility and the narrative around them are unique gave me the courage and strength to write this book. With humility, I am hopeful that readers of thebook will find them of some value.
The book is obviously limited to my knowledge and experience, and I wish to explicitly call out the following disclaimers in this regard:
Intended audience
This book is intended for any person that has influence in an enterprise that is aiming to improve its agility. The more the infl uence, the greater the value that the person will be able to derive from this book.
Specifically, the following roles associated with such an enterprise will benefit the most:
Having said this, I also believe the book can be an enabler for conversations between people who have an interest in enterprise agility.
What this book covers
Part 1 – The need for enterprise agility
This part examines the challenge of fast-paced change both from an opportunity and threat perspectives, and how the capabilities underlying agility can help the enterprise to leverage change to its advantage.
Chapter 1, Fast-Paced Change – Threat or Opportunity, deals with the impact of fast-paced change and the need for enterprises to reorient themselves to not only deal with change but also leverage the opportunities arising from it.
Chapter 2, From Agile to Agility, is about understanding the need for agility, how agility is different from Agile, and the underlying capabilities of agility.
Part 2 – The foundations of enterprise agility
This part examines the three foundational blocks of enterprise agility, namely, modeling the enterprise as a living system, mindset and culture, and leadership.
Chapter 3, The Enterprise as a Living System, explores shifting the enterprise from being a close-ended system to becoming a living system.
Chapter 4, Mindset and Culture, explores the significance of mindset and culture and how to influence them to become enablers for enhancing agility.
Chapter 5, Leadership, focuses on understanding the significance of leadership, and the key personal traits and behaviors of leaders which are critical for enterprise agility.
Part 3 – The components of enterprise agility
This part examines the six critical component of an enterprise, namely, organization structure, process, people, technology, governance, and customer, and suggests measures to unlock and enhance agility of these components, which will lead to enhancing agility of the enterprise.
Chapter 6, Organization Structure, covers the significance of organization structure and how to leverage this for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 7, Process, covers the significance of process and how to leverage process for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 8, People, covers the significance of people and how to leverage their capabilities for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 9, Technology, covers the significance of technology and how to leverage technology for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 10, Governance, covers the significance of governance and how to leverage governance mechanisms for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 11, Customer, covers the significance of customer and how best to serve the customer for enhancing effectiveness of enterprise agility.
Part 4 – The blind spots
This part examines two blind spots of the enterprise, namely, distributed teams and technology partners, and suggests measures to unlock and enhance agility of these areas, which will lead to enhancing agility of the enterprise.
Chapter 12, Distributed Teams, examines the significance of distributed teams and how to leverage them for enhancing enterprise agility.
Chapter 13, Technology Partners, examines the significance of technology partners and how to enable them for enhancing enterprise agility.
Part 5 – The journey for enhancing agility
This part examines how to create an enterprise specifi c action plan for enhancing agility, and the enablers for facilitating change within the enterprise.
Chapter 14, Framework for Action, provides a framework for creating an action plan to enhance agility based on the specific circumstances of the enterprise.
Chapter 15, Facilitating Change, is about learnings that can help in facilitating change across the enterprise.
Learning outcomes
Readers will be able to learn about these topics:
