Enterprise Agility For Dummies

Introduction

To survive and thrive in a fast-moving economy, enterprises must work to improve their agility; they need to be able to pivot quickly to respond to new technologies, emerging opportunities and threats, and ever-evolving customer demands. However, many organizations are built more like cruise ships than jet skis. They’re designed to command and control, making decisions at the top and passing them along the chain of command to the employees who do the work. Even when these organizations manage to change direction, they’re either too late to market or too far off course to stay ahead of the competition.

An agile enterprise is lean and nimble. Product developers collaborate closely with the organization’s leaders and management and with customers to optimize value. Decision-making is distributed throughout the organization, and employees are encouraged to take the initiative, experiment and innovate, and continuously learn and improve. Agile organizations ride the waves of change instead of being tossed and turned by external factors beyond their control.

However, a large-scale agile transformation is no small feat, especially when it develops complex products that traditionally involve a great deal of up-front planning. How do you transform a large organization with deeply entrenched functional areas into a collection of small, closely aligned teams without sinking the ship? In this book, I answer that question.

About This Book

Over the past ten years, I’ve helped a number ...