We are proud to say that the Endava is our gold sponsor at the 3rd Agile Serbia Conference. On the DEV stage they will introduce you with the speech “Six Agile Campfire Stories”. Also, they decided to take a step further and sent us a great blog post by George Anghelache.
Enterprises across the globe are looking for better ways of managing changes of priorities, faster time to market, better delivery predictability, and more frequent releases. At Endava, we know this means agility beyond development teams, across the entire Idea to Production cycle, where business, technology and operations are collaborating and defining success based on one common language: value delivered to end users.
Enterprise agile caveats and Endava solutions
Today Agile is no longer the new kid on the block. It has matured and became a vast global movement adopted by organisations of all sizes across all industries. Surveys have shown a staggering 90% of the respondents are doing some form of Agile. As encouraging as this sounds, we also discover that 20% are very new to Agile and 80% still need maturing, partly using techniques and practices or experimenting with Agile in pockets.
At Endava, we are passionate about Enterprise Agile and have a proven track record in the industry. We see Agile adoption proving to be challenging especially in large organisations. Here are some of the most common challenge themes we’ve encountered:
- Company ethos at odds with core Agile values
A successful Agile implementation will involve a delivery culture change that will focus beyond the Agile processes; it will also change the people and how they embody Agile principles and values. Therefore, instead of simply mimicking a process a company will truly become agile.
- Management and governance not supporting agility
Some agile implementations fall short because they are focusing too much on development teams. An optimal implementation needs to look at the entire idea of production cycle. IT should introduce Agile collaboration techniques across all departments, such as business, technology, operations, finance, strategy & control, HR, sales, marketing, legal. In this process it should be assisted with changing the governing model at all these levels.
- General organisation resistance to change
We see a lot of implementation efforts focusing too much on external training and coaching methods. This often results in poor adoption rates, as people and leaders in that organisation feel “it is done to them” and they are not part of the process; that they cannot influence with their own positive experiences and agile strengths. Remember, 80% of organisations are experimenting with agility as it is. At Endava, we create a joint group of Agile champions from client and our agile practitioners that drive the agile implementation from within, ensuring significantly increased adoption rates.
Making enterprise agility a success requires changing the culture of the organisation, not just adopting a new Agile process. The balance to be achieved is people times the process. This means an Agile process that ensures collaboration, a clear decision flow and provides repeatability. It is brought to life by people that truly embody the agile pillars of transparency through short feedback cycles and constant adaptation for improvement and innovation.
Also, IT development organisations need to ensure that their core engineering practices are suitable for faster paced delivery. Those practices require multi-skilled teams who can master techniques like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and DevOps. All of this needs to be possible at scale, and with teams distributed across geographical locations. Endava’s approach to distributed agile development includes effective engineering techniques, team level Agile practices supported by training & coaching, and a robust enterprise scaling framework to allow successful application when hundreds of people are involved in a project.
