Published on the 30/11/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Having conquered a decent chunk of the IT profession’s hearts and minds the Agile movement has set its sights on a broader swathe of enterprise professionals as it seeks to achieve ‘next-level Agile’…
“When you are trying to change a business dynamically you can’t just do technology,” according to Eric Willeke – and he should know. Willeke was a lead executive at Agile specialist Rally Software, which was this year bought by CA Technologies. He is now the director of transformation services for the organisation and leading a programme of internal transformation at CA.
He said that to be truly transformative organisations needed to “bring agility into business transformations and implement … the same concepts and principles” He said that the structures of most organisations meant that even if a brand new service was parachuted into a business immediately and at no cost it could take up to two years to deploy that because of the clunkiness of internal structures.
One of the immediate issues was overcoming enterprise financial management where 12 month budget cycles posed a huge impost on an organisation’s ability to be agile. Instead finance departments needed to revamp their structures and decentralize decision making in order to allow the broader enterprise to be more nimble.
“The hard part is how to get companies to do that. It’s mostly a motivational and engagement problem,” said Willeke, who is in Australia to run some courses for Agile users to encourage broader deployment of the approach for business transformation. He said that it was now more than a case of evangelising Agile – claiming that most enterprises understood its benefits, at least in an IT application – but working with organisations to understand how Agile practices could be deployed across the different functions of the enterprise.
He said it was often effective to focus on business functions that were experiencing “the most pain.”
For his own CA transformation programme he said that meant there had been an “insane pull from marketing, service delivery and engineering.”
To drive through the change he said enterprises were “Building management teams that take ownership of changing the company, then having senior executives lead by example and go to the training.” One potential role for the CIO in this was to act as an executive sponsor of the initiative – and also to model appropriate behaviours.
“This is easy to stand behind until you have to cancel a release because of the business value or quality,” he said, but stressed that was essential in order to maintain credibility.
