The Journey to Enterprise Agility

Systems Thinking and Organizational Legacy

By: Daryl Kulak, Hong Li

Narrated by: Daryl Kulak

Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

A guide to navigating the messiness of software development process change, dealing with all the legacy organizational elements, and focusing on increasing business agility.

There are lots of enterprise Agile frameworks - SAFe, NEXUS, LeSS, DAD, GROWS, Lean Enterprise, Modern Agile, and many others. They are all pretty good. But they all miss one important factor: how the heck do you get there? They describe perfect little "cities on the hill" but they don't give advice as to what to do when the program management office (PMO) cracks down on your status reporting, or when enterprise architecture wants yet another review of your design diagrams.

The Journey to Enterprise Agility is about just that - the journey. Lots of things can slow or stop an Agile transformation. But that doesn't mean these legacy groups are evil or even have bad intentions. They have their jobs to do. Your transformation effort needs to accommodate their needs as well as your own. To do this in a structured way, we use concepts and principles from the world of systems thinking. And not the systems thinking of Six Sigma or Lean Manufacturing, but a different school called "soft systems thinking" that is most helpful in dealing with problems of people and perspectives.

Think of this book as a guidebook to working on all the complicated, messy problems of changing software process in an enterprise. The Agile teams will first need to adapt to the legacy groups around them. And then later, the legacy groups can work on transforming themselves, morphing into something more nimble that can help to produce business value faster and more reliably than the old waterfall processes.

©2017 Springer International Publishing (P)2017 Daryl Kulak and Hong Li

Powerful approach to "Why?" Agile

The authors truly have lived and breathed Agile and take the approach in the book of discussing the "Why" instead of focusing on the all-to-often trap of best practices. The approach embodies it's own message and I've already shared it with those on my current project.

One of my top recommended books

As a leadership coach, I read or listen to a lot of leadership and coaching books. For leaders in any company facing challenges in becoming a more agile organization (and that should be almost all organizations), this book provide great insights and guidance in how to progress on that journey. It’s right up there with “The Age of Agile” by Steve Denning.

mostly excellent

aside from a few misgivings about lean and how it's used in software delivery, I found this book to be spot-on with excellent research and insight.

Fluff

This book is just another here's how to do agile work management. Says deadlines should be taken seriously but called estimation a waste of time and commitments inappropriate. Talks about the dangers of false precision then advises using story points like t-shirt sizes. Does not understand the original intent of story points. Thinks "value stories" are something novel. Instead of using features for "motility" seems to be advocating hasty story creation. lots of good points on trust but uses us vs them language e.g. "the business". Notes that "requirements" is a poor quality word, which I strongly agree with, but then uses it throughout the book. Not really seeing the essence of this book matching the title. Disappointed based on high reviews maybe it's just me.