The Journey to Enterprise Agility

This is the first book to seriously address the disconnection between nimble Agile teams and other groups in the enterprise, including enterprise architecture, the program management office (PMO), human resources, and even business executives.

When an enterprise experiments with practice improvements, software development teams often jump on board with excitement, while other groups are left to wonder how they will fit in.

We address how these groups can adapt to Agile teams. More importantly, we show how many Agile teams cause their own problems, damaging scalability and sustainability, by requiring special treatment, and by failing to bridge the gaps between themselves and other groups. We call this phenomenon 'Agile illth.'

Adopting a set of 'best practices' is not enough. All of us, Agile teams and the corporate groups, must change our intentions and worldviews to be more compatible with the success of the enterprise.

Join us on the journey to enterprise agility. It is a crooked path, fraught with danger, confusion and complexity. It is the only way to reach the pinnacles we hope to experience in the form of better business value delivered faster for less cost.

Daryl Kulak is an executive consultant with Pillar Technology in Columbus, Ohio. He has played almost every role on the software development team, from programmer to business analyst to architect to methodologist to tester to manager. Daryl has helped dozens of organizations in making the transition to Agile, and worked on his first iterative and incremental project in 1998 (before the Agile term was coined).

Dr. Hong Li is a senior consultant working in Columbus, Ohio. He was born in China and was one of the lucky ones to survive the Cultural Revolution. He attended Purdue University and University of Pittsburgh, attaining a PhD in Engineering and an MBA. Hong helps organizations with custom software development and data analytical solutions, using an Agile development lifecycle. Hong has done extensive research in the systems thinking field, particularly focusing on Robert Rosen's work with the M-R model and anticipatory systems.