Leadership lessons for an agile world

Agile Manifesto and incorporate them into your strategy. So, for example, if you really want autonomous teams, you will have to abandon hierarchical management styles and become agents of change.

Agile is fast, iterative and experimental . It encourages developers to take risks and is aimed at quickly creating large volumes of software. Therefore, it does not lend itself to rigid management practices. To lead these organizations, managers need to adopt a results-based mindset while giving their developers the freedom to take risks and fail. Agile was created to build things you don't necessarily know everything about from the beginning.

This often requires everyone to embrace product-focused thinking that puts customer needs at the center of all discussions. A product-focused mindset is more about understanding the purpose of the changes being made and the value they bring to users, rather than hitting stage gates or falling below a specific budget number.

The big difference between projects and products is that products have a longer useful life than projects, which begin and end. Once a product is launched, it evolves over time. You have to have a script for this. Typically has a business-minded product owner. And, most importantly, products are measured in terms of commercial value.

Projects are often measured against something called the Iron Triangle, which is made up of a fixed budget, fixed costs, and fixed deadlines. From a work point of view, everything revolves around meeting these three aspects.

Another way to think about product versus project is value stream management (VSM), which focuses on the success of the entire business process, not just one aspect of it. VSM helps deliver positive business results that lead to an overall successful agile program.

Finding Agile Success

Here are steps business and IT leaders can take to ensure agile success in their organizations.

Provide developers with flexible platforms

Avoid monolithic, best-of-breed development platforms. Instead, provide developers with modular tools that minimize dependencies. These should be based on cloud-based microservices architectures. Monolithic platforms can hamper development because the services and applications they host are tightly coupled. If a service fails, it can affect the entire development team.

Become agents of change

Because Agile is a journey, not a destination, leaders need to enable change. This can be difficult as it will require letting go of old ways of doing things. They must be students of change management as they continually learn about how to best apply agile methodology in their specific organizations. They must also be open to collaborative thinking and be humble, as no one can always know what is best.

Combine Agile and DevOps

To make the most of Agile, organizations need to combine it with DevOps. While Agile and DevOps can be done separately, there is no point creating new features and functionality quickly if it takes months for those changes to go into production. That's why combining agility with DevOps and automation CI/CD pipelines that include tools such as agile project management, build automation, test environment provisioning, continuous delivery, and release automation are essential to the success of your agile program.

Change your budgeting processes

While many adopt agile methodology in principle, they are not changing how they fund their development organizations. They still fund agile initiatives using annual budget cycles that do not fit the agile and rapidly changing nature. Allocate budgets on an ongoing basis while continually reassessing investments so that the work funded creates value and doesn't just check boxes.

Integrate agile into corporate governance

Doing agile alone will not produce the desired business benefits until it is combined with corporate governance functions such as business planning, strategic planning, portfolio planning, enterprise architecture, and budgeting. There are frameworks like DAD, LeSS and SAFe for this purpose. Apply these frameworks judiciously, prioritizing key practices that meet your needs and that will help you gradually change your culture.

But these structures can cause problems. Some of your employees will choose a more moderate framework like SAFe, while others may prefer Spotify's more aggressive engineering model. Choose the framework that best matches your agile/DevOps culture and goals.