When it comes to Agile, not even the sky’s the limit

[James182]

Your five-step fitness journey to delivering a truly agile enterprise

If you’ve been working in IT for more than a decade or so, you remember the days when business people rolled their eyes at any mention of Agile. They thought it was just an excuse to avoid doing ‘real’ project management and the latest IT trick to avoid doing things properly.

Well, fast forward a decade and now Agile is an integral part of virtually every business. Not only is it being used at the project level for multiple business-critical initiatives, it’s also scaling up the organization to improve how an organization plans, adjusts and delivers. But now that’s not enough. The level of disruption organizations are facing needs a response that can’t simply be achieved by scaling Agile a few levels up from the project delivery level.

Instead, it needs a response that integrates agile concepts from the very top of the organization – not just doing large “A” Agile, but being small “a” agile. That means creating an environment where leadership can adjust and pivot with minimal disruption and optimal effectiveness. It requires agile approaches to investment management, to portfolio planning and to strategic delivery.

In short, it requires enterprise agility – the creation of an entire organization that can respond as quickly as an Agile project team can adjust to a customer’s feedback. And that’s not going to happen without IT being an integral part of the solution.

Business leaders have always been able to pivot their thinking – lack of vision has never been the barrier to success. The challenge has been in executing that vision because organizational infrastructures simply aren’t built for agility. Nowhere is that truer than with technology. Every aspect of IT infrastructure has been designed to provide consistency. And consistency is the enemy of innovation.

As organizations turn more of their attention and their budgets toward digital transformation, the need for enterprise agility has never been more important. Digital transformation goals cannot be achieved if the organization cannot take advantage of emerging opportunities. Digital transformation cannot drive new relationships with stakeholders if technology forces those relationships to operate through legacy methods and processes.

Technology leaders must apply the Agile concepts that have been so successful at the operational level to the strategic level, partnering with business leaders to deliver effective and efficient enterprise agility that is a catalyst for ongoing, rapid business evolution. That’s not easy, and it can’t be achieved without a strong relationship between technology and business leaders. But it can be done, and ServiceNow can help you deliver. To learn more download the eBook The IT Fitness Journey: Scaling Work from Traditional to Agile Methods.