“Agile is not only about technology or project management. Agile is a mindset embracing ALL activities in a company from top management to youngest trainee. The Agile mindset is crucial to be competitive in 21th century.”
Michael Holm
CEO, Systematic Software
How can entire organizations become agile? How can agility and
innovation become an organization-wide capability, a part of the firm’s DNA?
The need is urgent. The economy-wide rate of return on assets of
US firms is one-quarter of 1965 levels. Customers are frustrated. Brands are
unraveling. Executive turnover is accelerating. Workers are disgruntled. The
workplace often resembles a Dilbert cartoon.
While Agile thinking is crucial for dealing with these challenges,
the methodology and terminology of the celebrated Agile Manifesto (2001), which
was formulated specifically for software development, cannot be applied with change.
It must be adapted and updated to meet today’s needs of general management, if
it is to achieve widespread acceptance outside software development.
In my forthcoming book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management,
(Jossey-Bass, November 2010), I
show how to apply Agile thinking to the entire enterprise in a comprehensive
and integrated fashion. The book describes a radically different kind of
management, of which Agile software development and lean manufacturing can be
seen as subsets.
How did I get into Agile?
In 2008, following a series of books on leadership storytelling, I
began conducting research into why promising initiatives in areas such as knowledge
management, innovation, lean manufacturing, marketing strategy and leadership
storytelling tended to flourish for a while and then be closed down or
sidelined by well-meaning traditional managers.
I looked for organizations around the world that had found ways to
organize and manage work that encouraged and reinforced creative initiatives.
Among the most interesting examples were workplaces implementing Agile
methodologies in software development, as well as factories implementing lean
manufacturing. Denning then began to explore how these methodologies could be
applied to the entire organization and examining organizations that were
already having success in doing that. The result of that research is his book, The
Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st
Century, which is to be published by Jossey-Bass in October 2010.
How Agile needs to be adapted
In the course of my research, I concluded that organizations can't
simply take the IT version of Agile and apply it without change in non-IT
settings. Adaptation is needed in several areas:
•
Terminology: The terminology
needs adaptation to the context of general management: for example, "working
software" –a key concept of the Agile Manifesto—doesn't apply outside IT.
•
Nature of the
work:
substantive adaptation is needed for different kinds of work. Whereas software
development is inherently divisible into iterations, many other types of work
are inherently lumpy, like building houses or submarines. For Agile to be more
generally applicable, there is a need to show it can be applied to these
different kinds of work.
•
Prioritization: Agile
implementation in software development has given rise to a very large number of
concepts, principles and practices. For Agile to be easily understood by
general managers, there is a need to distill the essential principles, and
distinguish those principles from practices that are desirable in some contexts
but not essential everywhere.
•
Reconciliation
with traditional management practices: When Agile practices are taken beyond software, they are in conflict
with the attitudes, values and practices of traditional management, which is entrenched
in most established organizations. For Agile to be successful in general
management, there is a need for a comprehensive and integrated view of what
managing an organization in an Agile fashion looks like, including its
benefits, costs and risks, and how it can be reconciled with traditional
management thinking.
•
Updating the
Agile Manifesto (2001): There is the need to learn from experience i.e. to apply “inspect
and adapt” to the Agile Manifesto itself. Thus although the Agile Manifesto was
a conceptual breakthrough in 2001, now nine years later, some aspects need
updating to include success factors from the most advanced Agile
implementations, particularly:
o
Putting more emphasis on delighting clients as the goal of all
work:
o
Focusing more on clients’ needs than on “working software” per se.
o
Providing a rationale for the use of self-organizing teams:
o
Strengthening the emphasis on transparency:
o
More explicit emphasis on interactive communication
The Leader’s Guide to Radical management shows how to
make the entire organization agile through seven key principles:
•
Focus work on delighting the client
•
Do work through self-organizing teams
•
Do work in client-driven iterations
•
Deliver value to clients with each iteration
•
Be totally open about impediments to improvement
•
Create a context for continuous self-improvement by the team
•
Communicate interactively with stories, questions, and
conversations
The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management also elaborates more
than seventy practices that support the seven guiding principles.
The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management delineates and
synthesizes the results obtained and learnings registered in a wide variety of
organizations, including Total Attorneys, Easel Corporation, B2b2dot0, Toyota, Quadrant
Homes, Joie de Vivre Hotels, IDEO, Bell Labs, US Navy Polaris Program, JayWay
Consulting, Kaiser Permanente, World Bank, Hermosillo project at Ford, Romeo
project at Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Standard & Poors, Systematic
Software, OpenView Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, Xebia and Thogus Products.
To learn more about radical management go here:
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