Enterprise Agility Quotes

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

Is the enterprise agile (able to react quickly), Lean (efficient) and adaptive (intelligent, proactive and change oriented)?

An enterprise must transform by changing its culture, changing its bureaucracy, changing its organization, changing its technical architecture—and making them agile.

true agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.

Women were a nimble workforce capable of working collaboratively in networks and fluid groups-we still speak of secretarial "pools"-adaptable to the needs of the enterprise

All of us need just one good accomplishment in order to get by. Obviously he can't spend the rest of his life climbing trees, but it's the agility and enterprise involved in the act that will make him a survivor. Enough

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?

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

If the focus is delivering something the customer wants, you must move from primarily measuring outputs to primarily measuring outcomes.

Data-informed and data-driven companies have a very different philosophy at their core. Where data-informed companies place more emphasis on the simple usage of data to make more informed decisions regarding the company and how it’s run, data-driven companies instead use data at their very core and use it to form almost every decision.

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?

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

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 our highly disjointed world at VeraComm, where functions don’t communicate well and don’t significantly collaborate, we fail to improve as a whole. Everybody seeks opportunities for improvement, but because we’re separated from each other, the best we can do is improve our individual step in the process and no more. We fail to understand that problems at one step can be caused by fundamental issues at another. And with learning cycles as slow as ours–pretty much equal to the frequency of releasing, every eight or ten months–we just can’t learn. Cause and effect are so widely separated from each other on the timeline that we simply cannot connect the dots. •

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

My goal is to honor the client and partner with them to design the right solutions for them. I should make an impact on the client’s world. However, I should never produce carbon copies of myself. I want people to think and to solve problems in ways that work for them.

Enterprise agility is the foundation for enterprise success in the age of cutting-edge technology enabled disruption.

The only people relatively happy with the status quo were the project managers and their group manager, who were working in accordance with their professional credential, the Project Management Professional (or PMP), granted to them for passing an exam from the PMI. They didn’t take responsibility for project failure, nor were they ever held accountable. Their role was to crank the handle on the bureaucracy and point the finger of blame at the department managers when expectations were not met. If there was going to be resistance, we would expect it to come from the project managers. Everyone else was eager for change.

having a development process that integrates stable code across the enterprise is one of the most effective ways of aligning the work across the teams,

Businesses, industries and corporations will face continuous Darwinian pressures and as such, the philosophy of “always in beta” (always evolving) will become more prevalent. This suggests that the global number of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs (enterprising company managers) will increase. Small and medium-sized enterprises will have the advantages of speed and the agility needed to deal with disruption and innovation.

Oracle 12c Enterprise or Standard Edition – building on Oracle’s unique ability to deliver Grid Computing, 12c gives Oracle customers the agility to respond faster to changing business conditions, gain competitive advantage through technology innovation, and reduce costs.

countries allow organizations to claim some aspects of software development as R&D and thereby receive tax benefits for doing so.

This book and the DevOps community as a whole have shown time and time again that DevOps practices and processes can take even the most legacy-riddled, old “horse” enterprise organization and turn it into a nimble technology organization.

Strong contracts are the basis for strong working relationships. They clearly define how we work together and we know how we will handle things when problems arise. With that out of the way, we can trust each other and put all our energy in collaborating and focusing on the work at hand.

1) What will be different about my interactions if I genuinely and authentically believe that every person in the organization I am coaching is completely competent and they do not need me to fix them, 2) In what ways have I been judging the people in the organizations I have coached to be incompetent, which means they need me to learn to do things properly.

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." - Jim Rohn

A great leader's courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position." - John C. Maxwell

In a truly agile enterprise, bureaucracy and innovation become partners. They create a system where both elements improve and where people in each camp collaborate to generate superior results. We’ll show how to harmonize the two in this book.

Bewilderingly, among some enterprises, there is a recent trend of anointing a special team that is separate from development and operations: the “DevOps” team. The whole point of DevOps is to create unity and collaboration among different specialties, not more silos. We even see job ads for “DevOps engineers,” who apparently are a special breed different from normal engineers and system admins. What happened? We believe this is the result of a buzzword-bingo approach to management. Rather than cultivating “individuals and interactions,” we have organizations hoping to avoid rethinking how to operate and instead get by with a reconfiguration of the software factory. And the surprising thing is that many have achieved that dubious goal.

Experiments in the complex problem domain are the changes you make. They are not to learn about the system from a third-party perspective or from some sense of meta about the organisation. The experiment is the actual change you make towards the system being in balance with its changing environment.

1992—Sir John Whitmore published what is considered to be one of the founding texts of the coaching industry, Coaching for Performance[6]. I strongly recommend anyone who is a coach or intends to be, to read this book. 1995—The first professional association body to provide coaching standards was founded, the (ICF) International Coach Federation[7].

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.

What I envision is an architecture that brings all the data management areas much closer together by providing a consistent view of how to uniformly apply security, governance, master data management, metadata, and data modeling, an architecture that can work using a combination of multiple cloud providers and on-premises platforms but still gives you the control and agility you need. It abstracts complexity for teams by providing domain-agnostic and reusable building blocks but still provides flexibility by providing a combination of different data delivery styles using a mix of technologies.

Perhaps the greatest difference between coaching and consulting is where the intellectual authority lies. Coaching is a partnership, with the coach and client collaborating primarily using the client’s intellectual authority and experience to design new experiments, decisions, and ideas. With coaching, the client is the one with the answers. It is not the coach’s job to advise and instruct, but to ask challenging questions, make observations, and open new perspectives, so the client can see options and plan the best solutions for their environment. Coaches help clients take time to reflect, learn, and develop new ways of thinking. With consulting, the intellectual authority is typically in the hands of the consultant. Clients turn to consultants for advice, instructions, and professional opinions because the consultant can provide answers in areas where the client does not have the experience or expertise. Consultants often step in and do work for the clients.

agile is the most disciplined and quality-driven set of development practices the industry has invented to date.

Leaders challenge the status quo and propose innovative ideas to bring a unique perspective to the enterprise.

agile teams need short backlogs of small items, a number of which are quite well-articulated and socialized, but only just prior to the iteration boundary in which they will be implemented.

The way people perceive things is truly important. In a sense, it is the most important thing there is.

For some teams, a nice, well-formed, and deep backlog gives them a sense of control of their destiny. They can see the work ahead, they can plan for current and future work, and they have a sense of comfort in knowing that they are always working on the next higher-prioritized thing.

the user story as the primary artifact for identifying system behaviors that deliver value to the customer. We implied that engaging a user in a dialogue about how they use the system, and what benefit they derive, is a straightforward process.

Actually, the word "manager" is a misnomer in an Agile environment, as there is hardly anything for someone to manage who is outside a self-organizing team.

We ignored the fact that many customers don’t know what they want. We ignored that fact that even when they know what they want, they can’t describe it. We ignored the fact that even when they can describe it, they often describe a proposed solution rather than the real need.