Rethinking the way we deliver business solutions

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to a full house at the Agile Brisbane Meetup group.  Hosted at the Thoughtworks offices and supported by our parent company, Procensol, the Agile Brisbane Meetup group is a a great forum for people who have an active interest in applying Agile, Scrum or Lean practices (either technical or business) to enable business transformation.

At the Meetup I presented my thoughts on what it means to deliver enterprise solutions in today’s constantly evolving business landscape.  As we all know, enabling transformation and innovation in large enterprise environments can be a massive task and one that requires a truly modern, agile approach.  An approach that does what the title of my presentation says – Rethinking to achieve more with less.

We live in a world of constant change. Economies, industries, governments and even technologies are changing at an unprecedented rate. Traditional ICT and business transformation strategies can no longer keep pace. There is a real drive towards faster and more rapid means of innovation, modernisation and digitisation.

In my presentation (which you can download below) I propose a new way of looking at Digital Transformation and Solution Design in the modern age. I even propose that Agile itself needs to be disrupted.  “Going Agile” has been gaining notable traction lately in meeting our modern transformation needs. However, I challenge us all to the question of whether Agile as we know it is enough.  Are we fast enough to meet demand? Can Agile practices alone affect businesses and how they relate to customers when we are still stuck with rigid processes, procedures, policies and legacy systems?

We actually posed some related questions to the group and the responses support the reality that even though big business wants quick change; quick transformation, projects are still facing historical roadblocks…even in an Agile environment we can be hampered by things like culture, leadership, program ownership and more.  For example, here are the top 8 responses to the question: “Think of a project that has worked well – what were the factors that contributed to success?”

Top responses:

• end-to-end autonomy of the project
• having the right resources (people and skills)
• true executive sponsorship
• a clear vision from the outset
• having a product owner
• having all the team in one place
• having a framework to guide us
• not being scared of failure

On the contrary, when I asked the following question there were NO responses: “Can you share some examples of where continuous improvement and agile practices have happened after launch?”

Top responses:

• <insert audience silence and sound of chirping crickets here>

So, how do we adapt to survive in an ever changing world? Here are some thoughts from the group to wrap up this post:

• got to work on the culture!
• to change you have to try different things
• not being too proud to ask questions and admit you don’t have all the answers
• moving to an expectation of continuous change
• embedding change into mindset

For those of you not at the Meetup, you can download your copy of the presentation below and if this article or the presentation itself raises any discussion points from you, we’d love to hear from you.

Download a copy of “Rethinking the way we deliver business solutions to achieve more with less” here.  (Note, the PDF will be saved straight to your downloads folder.)

A few pictures from the evening