Now that we know, there is something called agility that one can adopt to simply make more money by reducing overheads and most importantly, using existing assets. When thought openly, one could take seven steps towards agility. Organizations must practice non-linear methodical disciplines to attain total agility. Alignment of business processes towards software infrastructure components must be taken as a separate initiative. All methodologies must be isolated out and initiative on Agility must be well focused. Because agility is not an option. It must be built into the enterprise stream of business flow. Here are 7 simple steps that can be followed to attain the required agility and have managerial artifacts tied to the business processes.
1. Segregate business processes. Today, though segregation exists, code level isolation does not exist. Having resources that do the task is by itself not sufficient. Integration of new business processes may become on overhead and both parties involved will spent more time solving simple problems. This is the new issue residing within enterprises that require agility experts on the job.
2. Define enterprise efforts specifically on agility. Although this also exist, the initiatives are being most often, directed by enterprise architecture team or by some business owners. In either case first, there is no look out for existing methodologies being followed by owners of either LOB’s or IT. This causes more confusion and the entire idea of risk mitigation gets more emphasis and looses sight of agility.
3. Agility is not a linear process. Understand this and move towards tuning initiatives to use the Agile methods for improving existing processes and tuning them to meet demands and therefore having control on management on IT components.
4. Work loads must be iterative. While this being simple, one must attain this using less repetitive, productive and move-forward work loads. In this, risk mitigation must be incorporated.
5. Think outside the OOAD box. Enterprises have tons of various IT components working together to serve business needs. This has to be appreciated. Bringing a new methodology such as SCRUM to bring agility may at times be one line of confined thinking. This is because, not only OOAD exists within enterprises, there are also extreme programming and RUP and above all that, financially focused methodologies, that must be appreciated and incorporated within the attaining agility initiatives.
6. Bringing agility does not mean, meeting all the time. Again, it is not a linear process and therefore, expect to act in a non-linear way and inculcate this habit among stake-holders.
7. Make use of tools. Tools for the living.
