Are you embracing Agile?

I’ve recently been reading Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation, a very good book on DT by Neil Perkin and Peter Abraham, and it seems that better supporting organisational agility comes high on the list of necessary conditions for success (i.e. read, "just making progress").

So, inspired by a few random connections with different people in Toronto this week, I set out to find out the “State of the Union” in agile adoption within corporates, and came across Embracing Agile (Harvard Business Review, May 2016).

Written by some of the originators of Agile – including Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum - this article is a great read, and nicely illustrates the “quiet revolution” in agile adoption that is happening within some of the companies who are actually attaining digital mastery.

And, as definitions do matter, here it's worth saying that I use the term "digital mastery" quite deliberately, and in the exact same sense that the authors of a very good book called Leading Digital employ it:

"Digital Masters have overcome the difficulties that challenge their competitors. They know how and where to invest, and their leaders are committed to guiding the company powerfully into the digital future. They are already exploiting their digital advantage to build superior competitive positions in their industries."

This definition suggests that the organisations who are getting somewhere are doing so quite deliberately and systematically, and that adopting agile is part of a planned process rather than some dissident revolutionary workers' movement from within.

Embracing Agile won’t tell you how to practically apply an agile methodology within your organisation - although there are obviously people and books that will - but nevertheless it outlines the "why" of using agile, and hints strongly at the methodology’s fundamental importance in supporting digital transformation within organisations.

For instance, read the thought provoking conclusion of the article (my emphasis):

Agile innovation has revolutionized the software industry, which has arguably undergone more rapid and profound change than any other area of business over the past 30 years. Now it is poised to transform nearly every other function in every industry. At this point, the greatest impediment is not the need for better methodologies, empirical evidence of significant benefits, or proof that agile can work outside IT. It is the behavior of executives. Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth.

Well worth a read if you are even marginally interested and have 15-20 minutes to spare (or, failing that, you can watch the video).

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