The Agile Executive

Yesterday’s Agile Success Tour event in Atlanta was characterized by quite a strong interest of various participants in software capitalization. While the topic came up in previous success tour events, it was more pronounced in Atlanta. A subtle shift seems to be taking place: from technical aspects of rolling out Agile to business aspects the Agile champion needs to be aware of and prepared to address.

In the course of exploring software capitalization, participants in the Atlanta event brought up related questions about “the business of Agile.” For example:

• Cost accounting for Agile
• Return on the Agile investment
• Agile Portfolio Management
• Governance of the Agile project/initiative

Some of the participants were quite thoughtful about the dividing line between project-level Agile implementation and Enterprise-level implementation. They grasp that scaling Agile changes the nature of the questions one wrestles with. A few of them are actually considering  top-down approaches to implementing Agile. They do not necessrily subscribe to rolling Agile in a bottom-up manner. They devote quality time to wrestling with Agile scaling issues prior to starting the first Agile project.

I am hesitant to draw general conclusions based on a single event in a particular city. For example, I wonder whether the emphasis on capitalization might be related to the concentration of Supply Chain Management firms in Atlanta.

As the Success Tour “train” continues its journey (next stop: Washington, DC on July 23) we will soon have additional data points. Stay tuned…