Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most enterprises that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.
In this talk Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Data from recent industry data will be shared to describe what is happening in practice on enterprise agile teams. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments.
