Agile: the way forward for development

Daniel Hutley at The Open Group argues that in the modern enterprise, Agile development should be for everyone

No developer working today is unfamiliar with the premise of Agile development. It is a concept that has now been with us for over two decades, and which has been wildly influential on the way that digital products get built.

Even where teams do not explicitly call their working method Agile, the methodology’s principles of rapid delivery, high adaptability, shortened feedback cycles, and simplicity have influenced every modern piece of software that we interact with on a day to day basis. 

Indeed, the influence of Agile is such that technology-centric businesses are now likely to describe themselves as being agile, or sell their products and services on the promise of delivering greater agility to customers, even outside of the direct context of software engineering. 

That is not, in itself, a bad thing. As the evolutionary rate of technology accelerates year on year, the quality of agility has never been more important to businesses.

We need only look at the huge potential of generative AI which has emerged over recent months to see how vital it is to be able to take new ideas, apply them to products and processes, and ultimately bring value to the customer as quickly and effectively as possible. 

At the same time, there is a big difference between applying Agile to a particular development team, in which collaboration and sense-checking can be done verbally and immediately, and applying it to an enterprise at large.

That journey from employing Agile in discrete pockets to leveraging Agile at scale is a real stumbling block for almost any organisation which attempts it. Simply copying and pasting Agile thinking across teams all too often leads only to incompatibilities, diverting purposes, communications failures, poor investment, and other challenges. 

To fully live up to the language of agility which they employ, businesses need to embed holistic, and sometimes transformational principles which make Agile fit an organisational, managerial, or operational lens just as it does a development one. 

While this is a complex process with no magic bullet solution, there are a number of general principles that businesses can turn to which establish an effective, productive baseline on the road to Agile at scale. 

One important step is to start thinking of Agile in terms of learning, rather than in terms of change.

It can be an easy, unconscious mistake to see teams which rapidly and frequently shift direction as demonstrating higher agility. What this fails to measure is the value or productivity of the changes being made, alongside the fact that for many types of team – as for enterprises as a whole – predictability and stability are virtues that should not be sacrificed.  

Instead, consider identifying how quickly and often teams, be they developers, finance professionals, or marketers, learn new things about their own processes and the impacts that they have on the rest of the business and customers.

Each learning moment, in this approach, is also a change opportunity which can be judged according to its potential to deliver a benefit. 

It is also worth looking at the structures of the teams doing that learning and changing, and how they relate to each other. Software development professionals sometimes talk about Conway’s Law, which states that the structure of a product tends to echo the structure of organisation which created it.

For example, if the product listing functionality and search functionality in a shopping app are designed by distinct teams, users will likely notice disparities between how those features work in the finished product. 

Businesses can therefore gain broad agility by restructuring people in terms of what the finished product would ideally look like. In our example, a cross-functional team of engineers, designers, testers, and others who are collectively responsible for how users interact with products can collectively learn, change, and improve together, rather than spending valuable time trying to make systems interact well after the fact. 

This ties into the importance of becoming value-driven at an organisational level. Different kinds of professional with different domains of expertise naturally have differing default priorities: a programmer may prioritise clean code, a compliance officer may prioritise its auditability, or an executive may prioritise its return on investment.

Establishing clear, enterprise-wide, value-based outcomes helps teams to align their own priorities with a bigger picture and better informs how Agile’s faster learning cycles should lead to action. 

Finally, enterprises should understand that, while their journey towards agility may be unique, that does not mean that they cannot learn from those who have faced similar challenges before.

In particular, implementing an established model for enterprise-scale agility can shape and guide progress in a way which helps to avoid common pitfalls or missteps. 

For example, Open Agile Architecture™ (O-AA™), a standard of The Open Group, is a framework which encompasses a common language with technical definitions of key concepts, as well as in-depth guidance and examples for practitioners to resolve common problems in enterprise agility.

Developed collaboratively by members of The Open Group, it has been designed to complement rather than replace pre-existing approaches to Enterprise Architecture, making it a valuable tool for transforming towards greater agility with minimal disruption to existing processes and norms. 

Likewise, there is a lot of value to be found in taking part in communities of Agile practitioners who are themselves working through the process of implementing Agile at an enterprise scale.

To take us back to the first point, there is a real and important principle at play around learning faster and learning better – and a big part of that is about who or what you are learning from. 

A decade ago, the growth and spread of Agile was an exciting time for technology leaders who suddenly found themselves able to empower their teams to do better, more focused, more fulfilling work.

Over the next decade, I think we can bring that spirit of learning, betterment, and value to businesses as a whole. 

Daniel Hutley is Architecture Forum Director at The Open Group 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com