Afterthoughts from TiVi-ilta
August 31, 2007 – 21:13 by Mikko HämäläinenI was lucky enough to be one of the panelists at TiVi-ilta (http://tivi.fi/ilta) last evening. The subject was Agile, or more precisely, business oriented ICT development. Just a fast mental note about thoughts I had afterwards…
Agile is becoming a bandwagon thing
I think every business is struggling with time to market issues nowadays and that is of course one of the main promises of agile methods. However, I think businesses should see it more as a cultural shift towards a more flexible way of doing product development, from top to bottom. Should you not understand this, your agile pilots will fail or only produce suboptimal results. Business agility is not about being able to produce code faster, it’s about creating an innovation culture that nurtures change and is driven by solid execution.
Bottom-up or top-down implementation
There really is not a single correct way to start adapting agile methods for every business. It really depends on the corporate culture and freedom given to business units. I should stress, that I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all miracles. Agile fits some businesses rather well, whereas you need to have some more traditional methods for others. The best way to know if it suits your business development is to choose a smaller, low-risk, project, get a good and experienced partner and give it a go. Beware, agile will expose all the weaknesses in your development organization.
The interface between ICT and business owners
This issue has been a hot topic since forever. When adopting agile methods, the key issues are a) giving business owners both power and responsibility to steer the process b) finding a flexible way to share responsibilities. I think this should be a non-issue as long as responsibilities for both “sides” are clear. Also, ICT management should share common goals with business. This is usually the primary reason why co-operation is so hard: ICT department’s job is to consolidate and lower the total costs of operation whereas business’ goal is to get products out faster and get new revenue streams. And do all of this as early as possible in the project timeframe. So, the real issue is about strategy alignment.