New White Paper on Business Agility
Scott Gilbert and the Enthiosys team have written a white paper called “Business Agility: Harness the Power of What’s Possible” and 
distributed copies of at Agile 2009. We’re now asking for feedback from the broader product management, product owner and agile communities.
We’d appreciate you downloading a copy of the paper and sharing your insights with us by posting comments on this page, or by email to SGilbert@Enthiosys.com .
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September 1st, 2009 at 01 Sep 2009
Scott,
Well done.
Often as agile has become more broadly adopted and moved “upstream” to large organizations the path of least resistance becomes “going agile” within a functional silo. I understand the organization orientation as to why this occurs but it is precisely “anti-agile.” Only when an organization starts to break down walls and align around the product, innovation or customer – cutting across all functional disciplines – does it start to earn the promise of “going agile.”
The other part of your whitepaper that resonated is that of market sensing. SmokeJumper has been doing a lot of work in this realm – specifically helping organizations develop a richer understanding of the market, who they should be targeting and what are the unmet human needs. (Note I didn’t say technological needs). So often customer segmentation gets the basic treatment of size of company / vertical (B2B) or age / gender / enthnicity (B2C). Rarely does this orientation provide breakthrough thinking. One needs to turn this model on its side and look for commonalities and differences in behavior or attitude or, dare I say, psychographics. Only then do you start to see the word in a more nuanced yet insightful way.
With breakthrough thinking about your market perhaps then you will help cultivate a spirit of business agility within the organization that will help move it forward.
September 16th, 2009 at 16 Sep 2009
Scott,
Great paper. I think this is one of the key messages the agile community has to get out now, which is that the full benefits of a lean/agile approach can’t be realized until you extend the principles beyond dev teams and across the enterprise.
Regarding governance issues and providing an appropriate decision framework for pushing decisions down to lower levels in the org, I think this topic may need a bit more explanation or a concrete example. Don Reinertsen has a great example of the weight/cost budget at Boeing where any engineer is allowed to spend up to a certain dollar amount per pound of reduced weight. An example from software would be fantastic, since the costs & benefits are often no so easily quantifiable.
I agree that annual planning and budgeting cycles are at the root of the problem of big batches. Here it would be great if you could be more specific about what alternatives you propose.
Cheers!
November 17th, 2009 at 17 Nov 2009
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