The Agile Executive

You do not need to be an expert in Value Stream Mapping to appreciate the power of speeding up deployment to match the pace of Agile development. By aligning development with deployment, you streamline “production” with “consumption.” The rationale for so doing is aptly captured in the first bullet of the Declaration of Interdependence:

We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.

As pointed out in previous posts in this blog, Flickr and IMVU seem to be doing an exceptionally fine job streamlining the flow of value: every thirty minutes and every nine minutes respectively. A recent presentation in Velocity 2009 by John Allpsaw and John Hammond adds color how development and operations at Flickr cooperate to accomplish “10+ deploys per day.”

What does such fast pace mean to the business? In a nutshell, much of the guess work as to what features are really needed is eliminated when you develop, deploy and collect customer feedback in ultra fast manner. Consequently, the company’s business design is likely to be transformed. Click here, here, and here for more detailed discussions how the business design gets transformed.

Michael Cote, Andrew Shafer and I have been pondering  about aligning development and operations for quite sometime. On the one hand, we are painfully aware of the traditional desire to minimize change in IT operations. On the other hand, we are of the opinion Agile principles are quite applicable to operations. We often wonder whether the obstacles between Agile and ITIL are real or imaginary. We actually believe the {development –> operations} theme is an important instantiation of Dean Leffingwell‘s recent thoughts about applying Agile/Lean principles to other knowledge work.

The three of us – Michael, Andrew and I – decided to do a few podcasts to explore what stands between Agile and ITIL. The first of these podcasts will be published this month (July 2009).

Stay tuned…