Posts Tagged ‘Hyper-Segmentation’
Agile 2.0 in the Cutter Summit
I will be presenting on the Agile 2.0 subject in the forthcoming Cutter Summit. The premise of my presentation is that markets nowadays are vastly different from those we used to compete in ten years ago. The changes in the markets pose new challenges to software methods. Insofar as Agile methods are concerned, we are starting to see a new generation methods. I perceive these methods as Agile 2.0.
Here is the abstract of my presentation:
Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is itself dramatically changing. What we are now witnessing is the emergence of Agile 2.0.
Three rapidly converging trends are driving the emergence of Agile 2.0:
- Markets are becoming hyper-segmented;
- Markets are also becoming fleetingly transient; and
- The value chains that serve the markets are dramatically different from yesterday’s value chains.
Traditionally, the Agile movement responded to change by “merging” two strands – development and testing – at the team level. Agile 2.0 extends this single-level approach by simultaneously applying Agile principles at three tiers:
- The tier at which development, testing and operations merge
- The tier at which strategy and delivery merge
- The tier at which problem and solution merge
Agile 2.0 addresses the key challenge posed by “change is changing”: how to solve a problem when it is not understood well enough to produce a viable solution. Rapidly interlinked iterations at all three levels make it possible to substitute learning for planning. It’s through tight feedback loops in and amongst the three levels that the pace of learning accelerates to match the speed of change.
In this presentation, Cutter Fellow and Director of Cutter’s Agile practice, Israel Gat, will divulge the details you need to know about how to implement Agile 2.0 in your organization/company. You’ll get a blueprint for assessing and responding to the new realities of the competitive environment — without compromising the tried and true Agile tenets.
A New Context for Agile
Readers of both the Cutter Blog and The Agile Executive are probably familiar with my my view that Agile nowadays is deployed in a new context. The Agile roll-out is at the very heart of the confluence of major changes in markets, value chains and technological capabilities. Markets are tilting toward hyper-segmentation; value chains are being populated with prosumers; and, technological capabilities are becoming a problem of choosing, not of choice. Hence, the real starting point for the Agile roll-out, indicated by the you are here marker in Figure 1, is comprehending the implications of the merging of these three trends in the context of the client’s business.
Figure 1: A New Context for Agile
DZone has just published an interview with me on the subject. Click here for details, including a discussion of the nature and power of ‘Super-Fresh’ Code in the new context.
The Three Faces of Innovation
To succeed with innovation, you need to simultaneously address all three aspects:
- Affordable experimentation through the Agile process.
- Empowerment of (self sufficient) local teams.
- Let go of the hierarchical control concentrated in corporate headquarters.
Agile Enterprise Forum 2011
Charles Handy, Chris Potts, Don Reinertsen, John Seddon and I are the featured speakers in the Agile Enterprise Forum 2011. The Forum will be held on March 10, 2011 in the Chandos House at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Attendance is limited to 30 CIOs.
The theme for the forum is Agility for Complex Organizations. The overarching message is nicely captured in the following summary by James Yoxall:
There are two strands of interest for a CIO: strategy and delivery. The Agile/Lean message can be summarised as “merging” the two, so that delivery can start before strategy is complete, and delivery informs strategy through feedback loops. This leads to a faster/earlier delivery and a better end result.
My own workshop – Agile Governance: Tying Delivery to Value – builds on this message by describing a specific strategic initiative which is not achievable without the use of advanced delivery techniques. Here is the abstract for my workshop:
This workshop will explore mechanisms for unlocking the full potential of existing software through the combination of Agile/Lean methods with technical debt techniques. These mechanisms apply to complex organisations that rely on in-house development teams as well as to third party delivery partners. Israel’s approach emphasizes the need to continuously monitor and mitigate the decay of software that more often than not had been developed over many years. Most importantly, it shows how well-governed software can become the enabler for unleashing the synergistic power of cloud, mobile and social.
You can think of the workshop as linking past, present and future. The “sins” of the past require technical debt reduction initiatives today. These initiatives utilize the classical Agile/Lean techniques of continuous measurement and tight feedback loops. Without such initiative, the value of existing software cannot be unlocked in the future. In particular, competing in the hyper-segmented markets that cloud, mobile and social generate will be next to impossible for legacy software that has not been modernized.
The Agile Executive 