I gave a short talk today to a group of VPs and CIOs on the nature of Agile. In a true startup, it’s very easy for the team to adopt agile. But in an enterprise, agile development is a relatively new software lifecycle. Only recently, maybe the last few years has the agile community established best practices and methodologies that can apply to development performed in larger companies.In enterprises, it’s usually the technology department and more specifically, individuals on the software team that push to an agile lifecycle. They may even pilot agile on a small project or with a small team. But if the process is successful, it will quickly force other groups or functions to adopt their processes.The net result: over a period of time, successful agile teams and delivery will encourage other organizational changes especially with teams and functions that directly interface with the software development teams.

First, consider the greater IT organization. QA will be the first team affected especially if the agile team adopts Test Driven Development (TDD). In order for the agile team to deliver releasable software at the end of an iteration, QA must find ways to integrate their testing into the agile lifecycle.

Other IT teams may not be so agile. A good example are infrastructure teams that have purchasing and implementation steps that can’t easily align to agile deliveries.

Here’s another issue. Security teams and other enterprise functions will often impose requirements onto the software team. These teams need to understand how and when to specifify these requirements and need to work with a new role, a Product Owner, to get changes prioritized.

Then there are the business teams and in particular Product Management. Will Product Management move from requirements docs to writing user stories? Or will stories be an IT responsibility? How will product managers handle the need to develop a more transparent prioritization process? Will they be accessible to the software teams?

Are these good changes? Most often yes. It brings IT into alignment with the Business. It establishes more efficient end to end product delivery. It gets multidisciplinary teams to be more efficient and innovative.

But remember, change isn’t easy.