Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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I'm very careful in these posts, to separate the terms "Agile" and "Business Agility". In this post, I'll link the two, showing why Agile [IT development methods] are important for Business Agility [providing organisations with the flexibility and speed of reaction to implement change in response to market changes].

The Advantages of Agile

A recent Forrester report - Justify Agile With Shorter, Faster Development (subscribed content) - gives some good statistics for the advantages of using Agile:

• 32% increase in development speed
• 46% improvement in quality (through continued iteration)
• 43% more delivery of change (technical debt)
• 38% improvement in satisfaction from business users
• 37% better business / IT alignment

And some other recent reports added:

• 37% time to market improvement
• 16% productivity increase (from reduction of defects)

Why Agile is a perfect fit for Business Agility

The figures above show why Agile is the prefect fit for organisations that want business agility:

• Better alignment of IT with the business
• Better time to market
• Better delivery of change

As well as these high-level metrics, the incremental delivery that is an integral part of Agile gives the flexibility and reactivity to be able to prioritise and implement new ideas rapidly, a crucial element of business agility - for more on this see my next post on Governance.

Agile is a particularly natural fit in the world of digital media, to give this flexibility and to keep pace with customers' needs. As Forrester reports - "Agile development is de rigueur in digital projects".

Agile is also gaining traction in markets that have been the bastion of waterfall approaches such as Government IT - see Using Agile in Government Agencies and Delivering Agile in Government; Learning Lessons from the Commercial Sector. The Government sees Agile as being able to cut through a number of the problems of waterfall development such as inflexibility and delayed RoI.

Delivery Capability - Build Your [Own] Software Competency

An important corollary here is that Business Agility relies on having the capability to deliver change and particularly to deliver IT-enabled change.

It is also interesting to note that the likes of Forrester are pointing towards the need for internal delivery capabilities, supported by external expertise, as opposed to complete outsourcing of all IT, which was the trend until recently.

The skills needed include:

• User experience (UX) expertise - personas, customer journeys, A/B testing
• Solution / enterprise architects - you cannot deliver the above by just buying the technologies; you need to build an architecture around them
• Design and development - using appropriate IT platforms