Digital Agility

The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile

Pearl Zhu

The Author of “Digital Master” Book Series & “Future of CIO” Blog

WWW.PEARLZHU.COM CIO MASTER Digital Agility

DIGITAL MASTER

D I PG EI AT RA LL

M A ZS HT UER

G L O I K D E I G A I T P A R L O , !

Title: Digital AgilitySub Title: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile

Author:Pearl Zhu

ISBN: 978-1-4835727-8--9

Copyright Date:June. 2016

About “Digital Agility”

SummaryThe world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. Agile is one of such powerful pillars to lead digital transformation and enable the business to unleash its full potential. The purpose of the book “Digital Agility” is to:

● Share the insight about agile philosophy and mindsets ● Clarify a set of agile principles and disciplines● Develop the best and next agile practices to scale up● Describe potential agile pitfalls and how to prevent them● Connect the agile dots to build a creative working environment● Renovate strategy execution continuum to improve effectiveness● Measure the right things about agile and measure them right● Sum up agile maturity from multidimensional perspectives● Inspire healthy debates to move agile up to the next level of maturity

Chapter 1 Agile is the State of Mind

Agile is the State of Mind

The Agile transformation is a change in mindset. Agile mindset is about empathy, people-centricity, and improvement. Agile is not about free thinking or doing without structure, Agile does not take less discipline, but needs more engineering and management discipline. You can not expect big bang mindset change so you need to start with agile philosophy and develop a set of best/next practices.

Chapter 2 Agile PrinciplesAgility is not only the ability to create the changes, but also the capability to adapt to changes. The principles of agile can be used by individuals and non-engineering groups as well.

Agile helps management immensely through the power of collaboration, transparency, and feedback. Agile is the culture as well. It is important to recognize that moving to Agile may require a significant culture change that affects the entire business. It’s a set of principles to run today’s digital organizations.

Chapter 3 Agile Best/Next PracticesMany forward-looking organizations are shifting from doing Agile to being Agile. Scaling agile needs to be taken in several dimensions. It’s not only the number of team members. There is also the number of teams, the number of sites, the number of time zones, the number of products, etc.

An even more importantly, how to follow the set of agile principles and practice Agile up, to build an agile leadership team or boardroom, and apply agile philosophy to run an entire organization?

Chapter 4 The Pitfalls in Agile MovementMore and more organizations are on the journey from doing Agile to being agile, and there are many pitfalls on they way: What are the biggest problems for people or companies when they decide to go Agile? What is the hardest thing when you choose that road? What are your biggest pains? What are the causes of the failures? Who should take more responsibility? The leadership or fellowship?

Agility won’t fix what being called “technical problem.” It is a way to organize work. You still have to be good at doing the work.

Chapter 5 Agile Dot ConnectionsAgility within and itself is a strategy. Agility is not only the ability to create the changes, but also the capability to adapt to changes. And agility is about how to connect the dots in building a creative working environment and shaping a customer-centric organization.

Agile leverages the wisdom of the masses to scale up and drive success. Agile dot-connection practices can help anyone or any group focus their attention effectively and take right actions towards a vision.

Chapter 6 Agile MeasurementAgile values and principles are best measured via linking what you want to achieve and top business goals. You have a set of well-defined values and principles based on Agile Manifesto. They are about what you believe and how you think. And you will always have to tie these together to get the big picture of your organizational agility.

In Agile, measure directly what you want to achieve, what your organizational goals are like, some of the key measures of Agile effectiveness are creating value, timely delivery, teamwork and productivity,etc.

Chapter 7 Agile Maturity“Being agile” considers the entire enterprise, not just the projects. It is based on systemic principles: The discipline of seeing “whole” which facilitates the rapid creation of business value.

“Being agile” is dependent on the appropriate amount of up-front architecture. “Being agile” acknowledges and encourages the dynamics and emergent properties of the project, team and environment. In other words, “agile” that is standardized is not agile. Adding Systems Thinking to agile projects is always beneficial to improve agile maturity.

Chapter 8 Agile DebatesThere are known known known unknown, unknown unknown, either running an Agile project or managing an agile business as a whole, do not think Agile is just a software management methodology, or the rigid engineering discipline. It is a digital philosophy with a set of brief principles to run today’s digital organization.

It is important to inspire creative thinking and encourage free debating, with the goals to do the right things and do them in the right way, to follow agile principles and make continuous improvement in agile practice and deliveries.

ConclusionAgility involves the ecosystem.

● Agile is a CULTURE, not a process

● The twin goals of Agile transformation are to increase value received and decrease risk.

● Transformation is one thing. The state “to be” is quite another.

● Agile is a mindset.

● Agiel is not just a business principle, but a life principle.

Author: Pearl Zhu Digital is the Age of Innovation

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