Why Agile at Scale?
Hey, I’m Jessica. I’m a member of Atlassian’s advisory team. Our team empowers customers to accelerate business outcomes using our solutions.
Who is this for? This article is for change agents in charge of driving their organization’s transformation and defining a solution path to investment-level agility. We provide guidance on establishing a transformation plan and recommend the products to best meet you where you are.
We’ve learned a lot over the last 20 years about making software development better. We’ve moved from waterfall scheduling to a just-in-time agile approach prioritizing outcomes around an ever-changing customer and market. Healthy agile teams report greater connection with their customer, better engineering practices that minimize rework, and higher job satisfaction.
As an industry, we need to take the next step. Many of us want to extend the benefits of agile across our organization. We seek not only team agility but enterprise agility as well. Let’s take a look at the challenges agile at scale presents and show you proven solutions to scale the benefits of agile across your business.
Why Agile at Scale?
All of us are somewhere along the agile transformation journey. One of the defining moments along that journey is personally feeling the magnitude when looking at multiple teams, dependencies, alignment of roadmaps, and differing work cultures across the modern enterprise.
A new acronym, VUCA, embodies that magnitude. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Let’s take a look at each of these components in the context of an enterprise agile transformation.
- Volatility - how fast do I need to change?
- Uncertainty - how much foresight can I reasonably expect?
- Complexity - how many inputs do I need to consider before making an effective decision?
- Ambiguity - how much do I need to clarify my worldview before proceeding?
The major benefit of agility is predictability. Connected, agile organizations employ a regular cadence which bolsters predictability that gives the confidence to make timely investment decisions in an increasingly VUCA world. An enterprise agile transformation radically changes the way a company approaches its market, making agility a key strategic approach which turns VUCA into a competitive advantage.
Now that we know the ‘why’ behind agile, let's turn on our attention to ‘how’ by thinking about what successful agile transformations look like and the challenges ahead.
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Agile: What does success look like?Was this content helpful?
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