The Agile Executive

I had the pleasure of participating in the May 7 and May 14 sessions of the Agile Austin “Ask an Expert” Service. You can read the questions/topics brought up in these sessions by clicking here. Following are two observations from the questions cited so far:

• Enterprise readiness issues are rarely understood, let alone addressed in advance of an Agile roll-out. The focus on the “hows” of the process seems to consume the energy of the Agile practitioners. Precious little is left for the “whys.”
• Many questions (and the discussions that follow) are actually about the software engineering fabric, not about Agile per se.

The two are actually related. It is too easy to try to boil the ocean if you do not think of Agile as a single “layer” in the overall software engineering fabric, pretty much along the lines one thinks of a layer such as Transport in the OSI Model. Needless to say, trying to boil the ocean can consume you to the point nothing is left for the deeper understanding of the “whys” of Agile.

The reader is encouraged to take a look at the post entitled The House Jim Built. The two views of Agile given in this post by Cutter consultants Jim Highsmith and David Spann capture the essence of Agile in a lucid manner. You can start with either of the two views, using the one you prefer as a guide to placing Agile in the bigger picture.

(Please note Anne Mullaney‘s kind offer in the thread accompanying the post to send the full copy of Jim’s E-Mail Advisor to readers of the blog. David’s Research Report is in the public domain).