One of the beauties of agile is in its name. Who doesn’t want to be agile? Can you imagine CIO of X Enterprise saying he or she doesn’t want their IT departments to be agile? Agile proponents did themselves a favor adopting the generic ‘agile development’ to represent processes like SCRUM, Extreme Programming, etc.

But enterprises have a few issues to contend with when going agile. Enterprises are big, decentralized, with legacy technologies, standards processes, and governance concerns. Agile teams and development life cycles create challenges to those who are responsible for these enterprise structures. For example, how can agile teams experiment with new technologies and be allowed to ‘fail early’? Are you willing to tear down the cubes and build open work spaces? Will your business people be open to collaborating with technologists? Are you open to a different approach to managing and measuring projects? Do your technology choices easy lend themselves to agile (think fast) development cycles?

Also, agile practitioners (product owners, scrum masters, developers, etc.) must realize that practicing agile in an enterprise is different than the ideal environments described in literature or practiced in startups. For example, there are practical limits to self organization.

In my last post on Getting Enterprise Executives to buy in to an Agile Development Lifecycle, I stated that organizational dynamics and culture play a significant role in the success or failure of adopting agile. This is a relatively short post on the subject, but ‘going agile’ can’t just be isolated to the development teams. Are you ready?