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Top-Down Support Is Essential For Wide Scale Agile Adoption
Many Agile projects start as grassroots, often surreptitious, initiatives. When successful, team members do their best to publicize their accomplishments and use the project as a baseline on which to launch others. But it is unlikely that these projects can lead to company-wide adoption without support from above. Management from both the business and IT sides of the house must buy into these new ways of building software and must understand the essential differences that Agile processes espouse. Top-down adoption is not about imposing Agile practices from the top down - it's about support from upper management. IT organizations that achieve this level of support are the ones that successfully deploy Agile processes across a wide range of business projects.
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Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Agile Software Development
Delivering More Business Value Where Needed
Within the software development community, one of the biggest movements over the past decade has been Agile Development whereby teams adopt practices and attitudes consistent with the now famous Agile Manifesto. Additionally, there has been much discussion over the past four to five years about applying principles from the Theory of Constraints (ToC) and Lean Product Development (Lean) to software development. This has had a tendency to muddy the surrounding waters as teams question whether they should apply Agile, ToC, or Lean concepts. Are these three approaches mutually exclusive? Is there some hidden magic that can be unlocked by careful application of all three? Isn't it hard enough just trying to be Agile, without also trying to be Lean and ToC-ish? In this article we give an overview of Lean and ToC and show how they can be used in conjunction with Agile practices to focus on an organization's business value. By using elements of Lean, ToC, and Agile together more business value can be delivered with less effort.
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Using Agile Development To Build A Partnership Between IT and Business
The most significant hurdle in adopting agile development is often gaining the acceptance of the business leadership. Business leaders either believe that agile requires too much time, or they are generally apathetic towards the effort. But while business leaders may be difficult to get on board at the beginning, they can be the strongest supporters of the agile process once they see and understand it. Getting them to try it is the hardest part. This article addresses the typical barriers to involving the business side of the house in an agile development approach, and outlines the key steps that Digital Focus has found to be successful in overcoming these barriers.
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For many
organizations, top-down support for Agile initiatives is a necessity. This is
not to say that management must drive
these projects, as is the case in most plan-driven shops, but rather that
without the buy-in from business and
IT managers, most Agile initiatives cannot scale. This month's Agile Journal
contributors share a wealth of experiences and lessons learned from companies
that have enjoyed top-down support and have benefited from Agile practices.
