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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Integrity, resourcefulness, and agility

Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?

In the agile world, success doesn't mean knowing exactly what the plan is before you begin. Success instead means having enough money left over to try an emergent opportunity after the deliberate plan has failed.

When you take out the trash yourself, it makes you think about ways to reduce the weight of the bin

It is difficult for IT to gain a seat at the table when IT is always failing, but on the other hand, an IT leader who is reacting to statistical noise—failures that he or she has already chosen to accept—is destroying business value. An IT leader must have the necessary technical skills, make impeccable decisions under uncertainty, and then have the courage to face the consequences.

Agile promotes networks over hierarchies, creativity over uniformity, human over mechanism, and customer need over political agenda

Consider: having feathers is correlated with being able to fly, but feathers do not cause flight. Lift causes flight

To cope at these poorly managed firms, workers who would otherwise be self-motivated switch their thinking to a kind of short-term survival strategy, where they do whatever is incentivized while remaining open to new opportunities based on their real motivations - usually finding those opportunities outside their current firm.

There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.

My fellow IT leaders, we must use these new Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices as a lever for changing the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We

I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.

In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service-providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered new projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and has been for many years.25

In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.

Good business outcomes are testable, valuable, independently achievable, and negotiable (TVIN). As

This book lays a lot of emphasis on having teams responsible for business outcomes (outcome-oriented teams) as opposed to being responsible for activities (activity-oriented teams). To

Decision-making is a solid business capability to improve business responsiveness, agility, and competency.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

It is virtually impossible to make any business decision that doesn’t result in at least one IT change.

Ensure releases can always be performed during normal business hours with zero downtime.

The overall organizational health needs to be measured via employee engagement, culture readiness, business agility, and customer-centricity, etc.

The digital capability is synthetic in nature, embedding agility in processes and focusing on building the long-term business competency.

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.

Even high-profile product and feature releases become routine by using dark launch techniques. Long before the launch date, we put all the required code for the feature into production, invisible to everyone except internal employees and small cohorts of real users, allowing us to test and evolve the feature until it achieves the desired business goal.

Up-front analysis helps us identify the smallest possible piece of work that will usefully achieve a business outcome using

One of the inherent challenges with initiatives such as DevOps transformations is that they are inevitably in conflict with ongoing business operations. Part

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, Crown Business, September 12, 2011 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010 Footnotes 1 The Black Swan, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010

I have been asked many times what an "outstanding manager" has in his personality? I reflected based on my tenure with some outstanding managers of the country and my sense tells me that he has razor sharp thinking, eloquent speaking ability, free-flow writing ability, quick in calculating/computing (numeric), Tech-savvy, pleasingly interactive, polite conversationalist and agile in navigating in the corridors of office floors/markets based on emerging business needs.

The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap. In short, startups should welcome the rare breed generally known as entrepreneurs. They’re open to learning and discovery—highly curious, inquisitive, and creative. They must be eager to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.” Readily able to wear multiple hats, often on the same day, and comfortable celebrating failure when it leads to learning and iteration.

Emerging operating models also mean that talent and culture have to be rethought in light of new skill requirements and the need to attract and retain the right sort of human capital. As data become central to both decision-making and operating models across industries, workforces require new skills, while processes need to be upgraded (for example, to take advantage of the availability of real-time information) and cultures need to evolve. As I mentioned, companies need to adapt to the concept of “talentism”. This is one of the most important, emerging drivers of competitiveness. In a world where talent is the dominant form of strategic advantage, the nature of organizational structures will have to be rethought. Flexible hierarchies, new ways of measuring and rewarding performance, new strategies for attracting and retaining skilled talent will all become key for organizational success. A capacity for agility will be as much about employee motivation and communication as it will be about setting business priorities and managing physical assets. My

This is what happens when you take a “big through small” approach. There are still dips, but they are shallower and shorter lived. Failing is learning; there will inevitably be setbacks. New skiers fall over. New musicians hit the wrong note and new language learners struggle to find the right word. A willingness to fail fast and often results in learning sooner. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. There is learning.

minimal viable compliance (#MVC)

In this tech-savvy world, the enhancement of globalization is changing our life very fast. However, you owe a small or large business; the use of the software is making our business simple yet. It helps us to manage our business effectively and reach great heights of success. Like many other software development companies around the world, Tech Dyno BD offers a software development service that helps your business or organization stay innovation-oriented, agile, and effective in managing company values best.

The Agile, Lean IT, and DevOps movements helped demonstrate the enormous value of smaller, more autonomous teams that were aligned to the flow of business, developing and releasing in small, iterative cycles, and course correcting based on feedback from users.

Some knowledge can only be shared by socialization, through the kind of shared learning experiences found in brainstorming sessions, pairing, face-to-face interactions, and a bias to action. Learning by doing, like a blacksmith training an apprentice.

In a leader-nurturing culture, people can build psychological safety, the single most important ingredient of a high-performing team.

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.

Agile Strategy Execution decentralizes knowledge and control so everyone can make the best choices for improvement within their domain in the context of what is most important for the business to improve.