Nifty title isn’t it. It also happens to be the title of the Mendix whitepaper, but I just thought it would work well for this post about, well, modeling the agile enterprise. In other words, let’s talk about bringing agile development to organizations of different sizes, and the enterprise effects (…er, business agility) of IT agility.

An Example in Telecom

So there’s a great case study by Ian Evans called Agile Delivery at British Telecom. He writes about the issues involved in bringing a large company, drowning itself in the waterfall approach, to the agile age. Eight thousand IT professionals relied almost entirely on waterfall delivery, with the exception of a few “fairly small, self-contained development teams.” Commercial Off-The-Shelf systems, changing the waterfall mindset of this IT regime, an “IT department that is not highly regarded within the business,” and legacy code for which tests do not exist – make up several of the challenges that large organizations undertake.

The Size of the Enterprise

Evans offers a few reflections for CIO’s in big business… It’s important to have a ‘critical mass’ of people who will back the idea of going agile, and the applications that going agile produce. Moving from twelve month development cycles to ninety day cycles will always be faced with some opposition, but back in 2006 (when the case originated), I bet there was more opposition than there is now. My favorite reflection: “You might expect that the business would be excited at the prospect of having regular deliveries of valuable functionality. However, the business also needs to move away from traditional waterfall practices and change how it engages with the IT organization.”