Agile Business Quotes

Shaping the company's future requires a board that fosters a culture of innovation and agility to adapt to changing market conditions.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare.

Agility is less about following agile processes and more about having a mindset of adaptability.

Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.

Incremental climate adaptation needs to shift to exponential climate adaptation.

In a VUCA world, if you’re not consciously confused, you’re ignorant. If you’re not preparing, you’re negligent.

The Red Queen Race necessitates being fast and astute. Speed alone is insufficient.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

If you wait for the mango fruits to fall, you'd be wasting your time while others are learning how to climb the tree

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

The problem with most strategic planning processes is they are not designed to create strategy. They are designed to create consistency and predictability.

Physically agile, this squishy strategist and tentacled tactician uses its intelligence and agency to intuit situations, anticipate outcomes, invent solutions, and improvise, remaining relevant for nearly 300 million years.

Be agile in decision-making - there may be no right answers.

Slack is inexpensive when you don’t need it but exorbitantly costly when you don’t have it. Incorporate buffer space to enhance agility.

Perhaps you thought that “getting it working” was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Business Paradigm Shifting helps companies stay agile in a rapidly changing market landscape.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.

In an era of predictable unpredictability and untamed algorithms, agility allows us to emerge in the here and now, without sacrificing our longer-term vision.

Reversible decisions are two-way doors, allowing for agility in the face of uncertainty.

In the age of AI, we explore the agility needed for humans to stay relevant in the decision-making process.

As we face inseparable technological and existential conditions, we enter an era of Techistentialism. AI will increasingly provide insights that enable more-informed predictive decision-making, humans should remain wary of an inadvertent reliance on prescriptive algorithms dictating specific decisions. Complex and uncertain environments inherently involve unknown unknowns; these are situations where we need to be agile despite the lack of immediate answers.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Agile is more a “direction,” than an “end.” Transforming to Agile culture means the business knows the direction they want to go on.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

Thriving in today’s marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile.

Potentially shippable is defined by a state of confidence or readiness, and shipping is a business decision.

The sword doesn't change. So you have to adapt to the sword. You can't change your surroundings. They only change once you have changed.

By empowering employees and distributing decision-making, organizations can significantly enhance their agility, responsiveness, and ability to adapt to change.

The increasing complexity and pace of change demand more agile and collaborative organizational structures.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

If you can’t out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits. So the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you’ll be. Incidentally, you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster, too.

Intrinsically we humans want to be happy, and happiness derives from having purpose, pursuit towards interesting and challenging ‘something’ that is greater than oneself.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Most change strategy models are not very strategic – change strategy is an important lynchpin between business strategy and change tactics.

The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.

Learning agility is the willingness and ability to learn, de-learn, and relearn. Limitations on learning are barriers invented by humans.

Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.

The goal of agility measure is to keep track of the most value-driven factors to lead business success.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

It appears evident that, for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.

Today, it is focused on not just building chains but also on the design of agile networks.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”?

Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

Business agility is not just about raw speed. It’s about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.

restructuring the organization to embrace more agile and adaptive models is a critical step in building resilience. By moving beyond traditional hierarchies, designing effective information flows, empowering employees, and cultivating a culture of experimentation and learning, organizations can create the foundation for long-term success in a dynamic and unpredictable environment.

Imagine a working culture where everyone is not looking at faults, but looking at positives. Encouragements are so lacking in today’s busy world. Start trying it first, and one day, someone will do the same for you!

Code formatting is important. It is too important to ignore and it is too important to treat religiously. Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.

What was this passion that attacked women for knitting under the most unpropitious conditions? A woman did not look her best knitting; the absorption, the glassy eyes, the restless, busy fingers! One needed the agility of a wild cat, and the will-power of a Napoleon to manage to knit in a crowded tube, but women managed it! If they succeeded in obtaining a seat, out came a miserable little strip of shrimp pink and click, click went the pins!

Reducing coordination and transaction costs is at the heart of Lean. It is waste elimination in its most potent form. It allows smaller batches to become efficient. It enables business agility. Reducing coordination and transaction costs is game changing.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

20th Century 21st Century Scale and Scope Speed and Fluidity Predictability Agility Rigid Organization Boundaries Fluid Organization Boundaries Command and Control Creative Empowerment Reactive and Risk Averse Intrapreneur Strategic Intent Profit and Purpose Competitive Advantage Comparative Advantage Data and Analytics Synthesizing Big Data

IT historically goes for perfection. Many times there is the thinking that unless every business requirement, function or feature is implemented the solution will not be acceptable. It is easy to over-architect solutions and build much more than what the business would be happy with. Constructing more than what is really needed is a form of waste.

Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.

I wonder sometimes if we need the opposite to agile. We need sudden leaps forward and then periods of stability. We need systems and processes designed in tandem with each other. We need to leap to create brand new entities based on the latest thinking and software, and periods of calm where we change little. It’s a bold new way to think about change, it’s countercultural, but it’s interesting to ponder.

The R6 Resilience Change Management Framework is a cyclical framework that consists of six iterative puzzle pieces: 1. Review the Macro/Micro Changes: This iteration emphasizes the importance of scanning (mostly) the external environment to identify emerging trends, disruptions, and opportunities. By understanding the broader context in which the organization operates, leaders can anticipate future challenges and proactively adapt their strategies. There should never be a time in the organizations existence where it stops reviewing the macro changes. There are times, though, when micro changes (internal) are where the focus needs to be. 2. Reassess the Business’ Capabilities in the Context of Macro Changes: This iteration is fundamentally about “who are we, and how can we really add value?” It also involves a critical evaluation of the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in light of the identified macro changes. This reassessment helps to identify areas where the organization needs to adapt or transform its capabilities to remain competitive. This iteration is largely inward-looking, focused on the organization. But it tempered with the idea that “how do our capabilities allow us to add value to our customers lives (existing or new).” 3. Redefine Target Market(s) Based on Reassessment of Capabilities: This iteration focuses on aligning the organization's target markets with the evolving needs and preferences of customers, the changing competitive landscape, and the new reality of the businesses capabilities. This may involve identifying new customer segments, developing personalized offerings, creating seamless omnichannel experiences, or approaching the same target market in new ways (offering them new kinds of value, or the same kind of value in new ways). 4. Redirect Capabilities Toward Redefined Target Market: This iteration involves realigning the organization's resources, processes, and strategies to effectively serve the redefined target markets. This may require investments in new technologies, optimization of supply chains, or the development of innovative products and services. 5. Restructure the Organization: This iteration focuses on adapting the organization's structure, culture, and talent to support the desired changes. This may involve creating agile teams, fostering a culture of innovation, or empowering employees to make decisions through new policies. 6. Repeat in Perpetuity – or – Render Paradigm Shift [R6-RPS]: This iteration underscores the importance of continuous monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. The R6 framework is not a one-time process in response to a change event, but an iterative cycle that enables organizations to remain agile and resilient in the face of ongoing change. Additionally, there are times when before repeating the cycle, a business may want/need to render an external paradigm shift by introducing a product or service or way of doing things that fundamentally changes the market – fundamentally changes the value exchange between customers, employees and organizations.

Saying that “the business is IT’s customer, and the customer is always right” seems like a good idea when there is deep dissatisfaction with IT that stems from a long history of unreliable service. But over the long term, this value trap sets up the IT unit for failure because customers are often wrong (especially about matters in which they are not experts), and calling colleagues “customers” puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.9

While it is not unheard of, most sane people would be embarrassed to take an introductory martial arts class and then develop their own “martial art” from it and teach it to unsuspecting students, exposing them to the danger of miscalculating their effectiveness at defending themselves in a critical situation. Yet agile practitioners do this every day ― some do not even feel any sense of shame for calling themselves “agile coaches” after a year of practical experience.

This principle fits well with the concept of business and development working daily. Business needs to be intensely involved with the process, if for nothing more than identifying the 80% of the work that we really don’t have to do. Just think of the amount of money that could be saved every year by reducing project scope to only those features and functions that are actually used! Think of how quickly we could deliver functionality! Think of how many more “projects” we could complete!

Recommended Reading The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Budget Approved by Johannes Ritter and Frank Röttgers provides a systematic guide for creating a financial business case. The book includes examples as well as the methods for using Monte Carlo simulation and sensitivity analysis to create the business case. The methods described in the book can also be used for quantifying risks and project costs. Mary and Tom Poppendieck in their book Lean Software Development: describe the lean principles and the types of waste in software projects.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.

The difficulty is that culture is unwritten and unstated. For the Agile team to use culture as a guide to what is valued by the business, it must excavate, deduce, hypothesize, and test. One thing that it cannot do is to try to rip out the existing culture and replace it with a “more Agile” one. Corporate culture is not an impediment to Agile adoption; it is a valuable clue to defining the success of Agile adoption.

To do Agile right, you had to work in pairs, write tests first, refactor, and commit to simple designs. You had to work in short cycles, producing executable output in each. You had to communicate with business on a regular and continuous basis.

The point is this: Being able to see around the corner of tomorrow and being agile enough to adapt to what’s coming have never been more important. And, in three parts, that’s exactly what this book will do.

The major conclusion was that this group of firms was pursuing strategies with a long-term perspective on where they wanted to go, but also with the recognition that whatever they were doing today wasn’t going to drive their future growth. Interestingly, they had identified and implemented ways of combining tremendous internal stability while motivating tremendous external agility, particularly in terms of business models.

Inherently, companies like ours are super agile, because we are not in control of our own destiny … We can only live off something that our clients have decided to do.

BizDevOps

Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change … agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.” —Jim Highsmith

A continuous learning culture will likely be the most effective way for this next generation of workers to relentlessly improve, and the successful companies that employ them.

Leaders set the example through coaching, empowering, and engaging individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

There are bubbles of agile in a sea of Gantt charts with predetermined solutions, dates, and spending predicted at the point of knowing the least, an annual, bottom-up financial planning process that takes six months of the year to plan and re-plan and focuses on output over outcomes. There are “drop dead dates” and “deadlines” (in most cases it’s not life or death); RAG (red, amber, green) statuses and change control processes; a change lifecycle with twenty mandatory artifacts, most with their own stage-gate governance committee; a traditional waterfall Project Management Office; sixty-page Steering Committee decks; project plans with the word “sprint” ten times in the middle; a lack of psychological safety; a performance appraisal model that incentivizes mediocrity (underpromise to overdeliver) and uses a Think Big, Start Big, Learn Slow approach. The good news, with a charitable intent, is that the organization wants to improve.

Rather than the domain of work being repetitive, knowable, and deterministic with known-unknowns (you know how to fix it if something goes wrong), unique product development is unknowable and emergent with unknown-unknowns instead. For something that has not been done before, you don’t know what you don’t know until you do something and get feedback.

When I started exploring what flag I should plant back in 2009, there was a confluence of events in the works. The business world was increasingly using a methodology called Agile as its preferred product-development process while, at the same time, digital design was becoming increasingly important. Technology was rapidly evolving, and design was becoming a key differentiating factor for success—this was just a couple of years after the introduction of the iPhone. Companies were struggling to figure out how to integrate these two trends successfully, which created an opportunity for me—no one had solved this problem. This is where I decided to plant my flag—because I had the expertise, the opportunity, a real problem to solve that many people were dealing with, and the credibility to speak to it. I decided to work on solving this challenge and to bring everyone willing along with me on my journey. My teams and I started experimenting, trying different ways of working. We often failed, but as we were going through our ups and downs, I was sharing—publicly writing and giving talks about—what we were trying to do. Turned out I wasn’t the only one struggling with this issue. The more I wrote and the more I presented, the more widely I became known out in the world as someone who was not only working to solve this issue, but who was a source of ideas, honesty, and inspiration. So, when I left TheLadders, I had already planted my flag. I had found the thing I wanted to be known for and the work I was passionate about. A quick word of warning… Success on this path is a double-edged sword and you should approach this process with eyes open. The flag you plant today may very well be with you for the rest of your life—especially if you build widespread credibility on the topic. It’s going to follow you wherever you go and define you. No matter what else I do out in the world, I will forever be Jeff Gothelf—the Lean UX guy.

It took me a couple of years after I woke up in that cold sweat to figure out what flag I was going to plant, and then how to do something with it. Using the process in Step 1, I found the things that I wanted to be known for and the work that I was passionate about. And then I started telling my story all the time to anyone who would actually listen. For me, this story was around Lean UX because of who I was at the time. I created a pitch based on design for designers, by designers, to change the way that they were working. And I honed that voice and that tone and that dialogue by telling the story over and over and over again using blog posts and articles and eventually in-person talks. The first talk I ever gave as a part of my new professional trajectory was on August 12, 2010. I told the story about how we solved the problem of integrating UX into Agile at TheLadders. And then the timeline started to accelerate from there. A month later, on September 24, I gave my first talk about Lean UX and it was in Paris. I was communicating about this topic publicly, and people were saying, “Hey, come give us a talk about it.” And I was writing about the topic in any publication that would actually listen to this kind of thing. I kept speaking and writing and making presentations, and as I got my ideas out into the world and put them into play in any way I could, on March 7, 2011, I finally hit the jackpot. This was three years after I had my 35th-birthday epiphany and the pressure was on—I knew I had just two years left before I was going to become obsolete, an also-ran. I hit the jackpot when I managed to get an article published in Smashing magazine. At the time, Smashing had a million readers online, and so the scale of my conversation was growing and growing because I was becoming known as the guy who had some answers to this question. That was a massive break for me because the article provided me with a global audience for the first time. Obviously, anything you publish on the internet is global and distributed, but the bottom line is that, if the platform you choose or that chooses you has a built-in audience, you stand a much bigger chance. Smashing magazine had an audience. The article, titled “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” became very successful, and that’s where I planted my flag—providing solutions to the Agile and design problem with a real-world tested solution nicely packaged and labeled as Lean UX.

The value of breaking big opportunities into a series of smaller opportunities is twofold. First, it allows us to tackle problems that otherwise might seem unsolvable. And second, it allows us to deliver value over time. That second benefit is at the heart of the Agile manifesto and is a key tenet of continuous improvement.

David Varonin is a digital business analyst with expertise in a wide array of platforms, including, but not limited to: Agile, Agile Craft, Azure DevOps, Jira, SAFe, and IBM 4690.

When resistance is overcome using positional power, it is highly likely that employees are acquiescing, while their behavior is actually passive-aggressive. When management’s attention is turned to something else, they’ll quietly revert to the old ways. They had no ownership in the changes, and they haven’t internalized them. It hasn’t become “how we do things around here.” It isn’t part of their identity individually or as a group. Evolutionary change is robust, while designed and managed change is fragile. The Kanban Method is fundamentally based in the belief that wiring a modern business with the means and mechanisms for evolutionary change—to have the evolutionary DNA that is able to respond to a changing environment and changing expectations, to evolve and remain fit-for-purpose—provides the resilience and robustness that organizations need to survive and thrive. The Kanban Method provides the operational means to maintain a fit-for-purpose organization that is built for survival.

deliver Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

Don’t have written coding standards? This is a great reason to create them.

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1 Minute Wisdom for Success: To Succeed in the world of business, requires one to create the most RELEVANT, and meaningful, value, and promote it, effectively, to those who have the need/interest, and capacity, to transact.

Shifting from a project mindset to a continuous mindset is hard. We tend to take our six-month-long waterfall project, carve it up into a series of two-week sprints, and call it “Agile.” But this isn’t Agile.

We hear all the time about how important it is to be physically fit. Our society has become ultra-focused on fitness and health. Our Facebook feeds are filled with seven-minute workouts. There are YouTube videos galore on seven days to rock-hard abs. The radio plays ads to lose ten pounds in ten days, but only if you call in the next ten minutes. Even the president told us to be physically fit. Remember the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in elementary school? A quick shuttle run, the dreaded flexed arm hang. It tested strength, endurance, flexibility, and agility. All different ways to prove we were physically fit. Or not. As a matter of fact, Americans now spend more on fitness than on college tuition.1 Over a lifetime, the average American spends more than $100,000 on things like gym memberships, supplements, exercise equipment, and personal training.2 Seems shocking, right? But where are the training programs for the thoughts in your head? Those thoughts that tell you that you have no choices when bad things happen. Those thoughts that try to convince you everything is out of your control in difficult situations. Where do you go if you want to be Thoughtfully Fit? Right here in this book.

In their 2012 paper, “A Taxonomy of Dependencies in Agile Software Development,” Diane Strode and Sid Huff propose three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource dependencies.14 Such a taxonomy can help pinpoint dependencies between teams and the potential constraints to the flow of work ahead of time.

1.   Identify your core capabilities as a business. Can you define precisely what gives your company competitive advantage? How easily can it be imitated? How do you deliver value to your customers? Evaluate your business as a set of processes and capabilities. Be clear on the definition, and break down big processes into smaller functions and services. 2.   Identify the services. Think through what the service, and the API for the service, might be. How do you make it a “black box”? In other words, how will you protect it from replication and theft? 3.   Where’s your advantage? How would you offer best-in-class commercial terms? Commercial terms include cost, speed, availability, quality, flexibility, and features. 4.   Can it be profitable? Would these commercial terms and capabilities be viable in the market? Would it be a viable profitable business for you? 5.   Test and evaluate. You have a critical and fact-based understanding of your core capabilities, their gaps, and the potential benefit (or lack thereof) of a platform. Build your agile approach to testing, learning, and building value as you go.