The Agile Executive

“I don’t care about Agile; I care about money!” These words, said to me not too long ago by an executive with whom I was discussing the roll-out of Agile in his division, are the impetus for this post. Whether you are or are not in R&D, Agile can have a significant impact on you and on your company, including the bottom line.

To keep things simple, listed below are a few “front lobe” considerations for CXOs – CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, COOs and CTOs. The listed considerations are neither “good” nor “bad” – they are what they are. They are rendered here for the thinking when an Agile topic comes up in the domain(s) you are responsible for.

Some of the considerations for CXO’s are linked to posts, articles or books that already address the subject to some degree.  As additional related posts will get rolled out on this blog, they will be linked to the bullets below. In other words, the Agile Considerations for CXOs post will evolve, serving as a quick index for an eclectic list of Agile CXO considerations.

CEO

• Business designs to utilize the power of Agile methods
• Market disruption by competitors who adopt Agile
• The Agile enterprise

CFO

• Efficiency; Lean; cost structure of the corporation
• Capitalization of (Agile) software
• Agile contracts

CIO

• Agile Business Service Management
• IT modernization
• Bridging the chasm between product development, deployment and operations
• Effective use of Agile in the data center
• Guidelines for BSM Investments

CMO

• Time-to-market
• Market-of-One
• Brand risk

COO

• Reconfiguring the business
• Agile portfolio management
• Off-shoring strategy vis-a-vis near-shoring vis-a-vis captive US teams;  Distributed Agile
• Can your company afford the software it is developing?
• How many product generations should the support policy cover?
• Application life-cycle management
• Enterprise software considerations

CTO

• R&D transformation
• Innovative (software) products
• Software evolution