Introducing Business-Agile: Bringing Agile to the Rest of the Enterprise

Donna Fitzgerald is a seasoned PPM and strategy execution expert, specializing in practical advice designed to produce the results organizations need. She spent 10 years at Gartner helping clients solve such problems as how to effectively execute strategy, how to convert the IT PMO into an agile powerhouse and how to improve their enterprise portfolio management. Prior to Gartner, Donna ran an agile software development organization, was a product manager at two software companies, co-founded a program management consulting company and was a Silicon Valley trained CFO. She also was a co-author in 2005 of the agile project management “Declaration of Interdependence.” See her blogs and more of her writing at Nimblepm.com.

Everyone in project management has heard of agile software development (ASD). In fact, for some PMs, the increasingly wide-scale adoption of ASD has fundamentally changed their entire career path.

As radical as this transformation seems to be in the IT PM community, it’s important to remember that IT is only one small area of the enterprise. Noteworthy is that 92% of the CEOs surveyed by Forbes magazine stated that agility is critical across their entire business if they wanted to achieve business success.

Back in the early 2000s when a group of us were working on the Declaration of Interdependence for Agile Project Leadership, we assumed our work would be the first step on a long journey toward enterprise agility. It turned out in hindsight that we were about a decade too early and our scope was too limited.

As important as project management is, like ASD, it doesn’t have enough breadth to appeal to the entire enterprise. What is now becoming apparent is that we need a global set of agile business principles and practices that can help organizations achieve agility throughout the enterprise.

Some in the ASD community feel that simply by insisting that the rest of the organization learn about the practices used in IT enterprise agility that they will be magically obtained. But the truth is ASD wasn’t intended to be a one-size-fits-all approach to …

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Published at Mon, 17 Dec 2018 05:00:00 +0000