The Agile Enterprise

View the implementation and operation of Agile at every level of the enterprise and at every point in the idea-to-delivery pipeline. Learn how Agile-mature organizations extend Agile practices pervasively and harmoniously through the whole enterprise to enable large companies to adapt nimbly to micro changes in market conditions and customer needs and continuously deliver optimal value to customers. This book serves as a guide for early-stage adopters of Agile who are in the process of implementing Agile incrementally. The industry has been slower to implement Agile at the enterprise level than at the team level because the latter is easier to do. As companies incrementally implement Agile, they discover that the team-by-team piecemeal approach is not fully yielding the business results they expected from Agile. Veteran Agile coach Mario Moreira argues that two critical conditions must have been conscientiously cultivated at a company before it can expect to reap in full measure the business benefits of mature Agile. First, every entity and person in the whole organization must be charged and committed to delivering value for the customer. Second, the employees at all levels within the organization must be empowered to deliver value for the customer by being challenged and enabled to take ownership of their teams and to self-organize their projects around the specific change requirements and the general value-driven imperative. This cultural transformation wrenches the status quo and typically provokes open and covert resistance in many quarters.

What Readers Will Learn

• The agile enterprise focuses on value delivery above processes and tools.
• Effective implementation of Agile depends on value-driving the flow through the idea-to-delivery pipeline at all levels of the organization.
• How to engineer idea pipelines to irrigate an organization’s work portfolio most quickly and productively•
• How to leverage agile practices such as Value Stream Mapping, Lean Canvas, Personas, Story Mapping, and Cost of Delay to deliver optimum value to customers

Who This Book Is For

• Executives and senior management
• sponsors of Agile within a company
• ScrumMasters and Agile coaches, champions, and consultants
• project management and quality assurance officers (PMOs and AMOs)
• portfolio managers
• product managers and product owners
• marketing and business managers
• functional, middle, and resource managers; and engineering heads and managers
• and cross-functional engineering/scrum teams