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

After spending 10 years explaining to organisations that Agile is not simply about engineering techniques and iterations I was delighted to meet with a customer earlier this week who talked of the success he’d had in using incremental delivery to manage strategy and demand within his business unit.

The business unit in question is currently caught in a perfect storm. They are retiring a financial product but need to continue to support and enhance the administrative systems until all of their existing customers have moved to the alternative. Enhancements will be driven by customer demand and also by regulatory requirements, but until there is clarity over the longevity of the product the extent of these requirements will be unclear. Allied to this the team has already begun downsizing and has been further affected by a number of resignations.

In simple terms there is no clarity of the amount of work to be done, or the resources to deliver it.

The consequence is that the business unit needs to be extremely responsive. It has developed a strategy and supporting incremental plan but the expectation is that this will change over time. Each requirement is simplified within the plan and nothing is implemented until it is essential. Implementation order is driven by business priority. The approach is exactly what is required by the business however it is only possible because of the approach taken within technology delivery and the short cycle-times that have been achieved.

He concluded our meeting with the comment, “without the flexibility offered by Agile we’d have to fix our business plan now, which is simply not practicable”. I went home a happy man.