There are two person’s posts on the topic of agile change management and enterprise agility. I have to reply to both of them based on their opinion about this topic. I have to provide my opinion about their post. The minimum number of words required for each person’s post is 400-450 words each.
Person 1 post: Justus ( Topic: Enterprise agility)
According to Vandersluis (2014), agile project management has become one of the fastest-growing and most popular aspects of Information Technology project management. Utilizing agile techniques in software development can make the difference between a project with a low chance of completion and one which will deliver results quickly and continue to deliver results over time.
He mentions that the key challenge in an enterprise project is the depth of change that it can cause in the organization. A common pitfall is to create a comprehensive plan and then push to deploy the entire plan at once. Applying agile thinking to change management projects is an excellent fit. Agile project management makes us think of the project at a strategic level and then at a tactical level to deliver production-ready results.
Portugal (2021) defines enterprise agility as an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to its business environment based on feedback from direct stakeholders and changes in market demands.
Agile organizations are comprised of cross-functional, self-sufficient teams that collaborate efficiently, maximizing productivity using fewer resources. These cross-functional teams have all the necessary skills to complete a task, project, or product. Business processes in agile teams are based on iterations: cycles of work ending with a working version of a product. Teams improve the product based on feedback collected with every new iteration. The feedback is collected from users, ensuring that the product provides as much value to the customer as possible.
Organizations that are seeking to scale agile need to assess their whole organization for agile adoption. They are encouraged to make assessments and gain buy-in from the executive level for agile adoption to succeed throughout the organization. RefineM (2013) has defined several criteria to evaluate whether agile is a good fit. The criteria are as follows:
The leader/sponsor has a clear vision, but the project scope is not known in its entirety.
Project requirements are expected to evolve as planning proceeds.
Changes are expected, even welcomed, late in the project and can be processed informally.
Time and cost are fixed, but the scope is flexible.
The client will accept fewer features at the end, but whatever gets delivered should be usable.
Stakeholders are eager to consume “low-hanging fruits” in the form of small and frequent deliveries of working software components.
Customers are highly involved in the project; they participate in the project almost every day.
When companies adopt an agile approach, they can expect a boost in employee engagement, operational effectiveness, and output quality. At the same time, they can observe a reduction in costs and faster time-to-market. (Portugal, 2021)
Portugal (2021) states that some of the benefits of achieving agility across the enterprise include the following:
Improve Employee Engagement
Boost Customer
Speed Up Time-to-Market
Increase Quality
Improve Operational Effectiveness
Save Costs and Reduce Spending
Person 2 post: Heather (Topic: Enterprise agility)
Enterprise Agility is a response to competitive pressure, to adapt fast to changes in market demands and seize opportunities while reducing costs. At the core of the Agile Enterprise are people, knowledge, skilled and innovative (Business Agility Institute). Essentially the goal of enterprise agility is to work to ensure the entire organization is Agile in all its actions. This is no easy task but is certainly doable. You can also think of agility as the ability to maintain effectiveness proactively in the face of changing circumstances and stresses, including the ability to conceptualize, design, create, and deploy a successful endeavor (Schlichter, McEver, & Hayes, 2010). With the world of business quickly shifting to meet client needs, organization must learn to improvise and adapt to frequent changes in business needs and the complexity of what clients seek for their products. It is a competitive market and only the strongest and most flexibility will surely survive. This means that organizations also need to identify how they can cope with change in their business models/strategies, their people, their teams, and their approaches to completing projects.
Most recently, we have seen a drastic change in working environments where the world basically went remote, and organizations had to shift how they operated. In the world of Agile this is not necessarily new as teams have been working in multiple locations for quite some time but ensuring the entire enterprise is agile takes some work. What many organizations have realized is that two operational imperatives are present: grow the capacity of one’s organization to translate strategic intent into project outcomes successfully, consistently, and predictably, and identify and cause the requisite maturity for different organizations to collaborate in complex endeavors with sufficient agility (Schlichter, McEver, & Hayes, 2010). Agility can also be thought of in terms of six key elements: robustness, resilience, responsiveness, innovation, flexibility, and adaptation. On top of this, organizations must train and hire people who think creatively about how they work, build on existing good practices, encourage teams to embrace change, and enable them to work well together (PMI, 2017).
Creating enterprise agility has many benefits to an organization, their employees, and clients. Some more commonly known benefits include the approaches to managing projects, whether predictive, hybrid or agile which all lead to successful outcomes, people and process factors that drive greater agility, revenue growth is greater among highly agile organizations, and formal governance structure like PMO are valued (PMI, 2017). Another benefit/aspect of agility to consider is that you can take multiple approaches to completing projects while remaining agile by doing hybrid approaches. Organizations achieve greater agility through attention to people, process, and culture. They recognize there is more than one way to get work done and invest in essential capabilities (PMI, 2017). The hybrid approaches to enterprise agility give flexibility in how projects are worked in each step to allow the organization to pick and choose how they want to complete based on their needs. There is the full agile approach where workflow is planned for current increments/iterations or the predictive approach in which the workflow is planned for a full lifecycle. There is also the agile approach to customer involvement throughout development or the predictive approach of contact at specific milestones, each involving the customer as needed. Both approaches have a goal of providing value to customers, advancement of strategic objectives, and organizational benefits. An organization may choose to interchange methods from predictive and agile depending on where they are in the project or the complexity of it. You can see that predictive approaches can very much compliment agile approaches and still provide value delivery at the end.
As a whole, I would say that the benefits definitely outweigh the cons of going agile in an organization. It helps to align organizations through shared processes, meet client needs (and exceed them), create a positive culture where teams collaborate and encourage each other through transparency and communication, and helps the organization to adapt to market/client changes. When the entire organization has similar mindset and practices, they can be much more effective in their work by prioritizing, communicating, and sharing workload. The end goal means more quickly deploying products for clients and then moving on to the next task.
References
Achieving Greater Agility: The people and process drivers that accelerate results (2017). Retrieved from Achieving Greater Project Agility | PMI
PMI (2017). Deliver Projects Better with any Approach. Achieving Greater Agility Through Multiple Approaches | PMI
Schlichter, J., McEver, J., & Hayes, R. E. (2010). Maturity frameworks for enterprise agility in the 21st century. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2010—North America, Washington, DC. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
The Drivers of Agility: Engaging people and building processes to accelerate results (2017). Retrieved from Drivers of Project Agility | PMI
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