Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

IndigoBlue has a long held view that incremental delivery, and the supporting incremental strategy, is core to the success of Agile management. This tenet is the basis for our governance framework and our approach to managing Agile at scale.  Last week I was presented with an illustration of this in the shape of one of our customers that has recently piloted the use of Agile in their office in the States.

In selecting an appropriate pilot they identified a project which is already a year late but was stuck in the analysis phase.  The new “Agile” project was structured to loosely follow a Scrum approach with 6-week sprints, standard planning and review meetings, daily stand-ups, on-site customer etc. After the first 3 deliveries the project was a resounding success, and it was agreed that the approach should be adopted more widely.

It is interesting however to consider what was successful about the project in question. While the Agile process elements and collaborative approach will have provided benefit, I would argue that the majority of value (greater than 90%) accrued from the simple incremental approach. By focusing on the immediate delivery (“what can we achieve in 6-weeks”) the team were no longer bogged-down in the challenge of how to meet all of the requirements and how to address uncertainties and complexities; they had implicitly developed the first part of an incremental strategy.

This, I would content, is true of most Agile projects and more so at scale. As projects become more complex the “Team in a Room” aspects of Scrum become stretched and less appropriate, the need for incremental thinking and the extension of this back to the wider business problem becomes increasingly valuable.

Of course, in the above example, the key governance challenges that now exist are how these initial increments contribute to the complete solution, and what uncertainties have been ignored and may resurface later. However, in the short-term the team can bask in the glow of the immediate successes.