Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Enablers for enhancing agility


The enablers suggested in the following subsections are largely in the context of software development teams. However, they can be adopted in any context, keeping intact the underlying principle behind each of the enablers. The enablers can be divided into four broad categories: people, processes, tools and infrastructure, and structure.

People

The following factors related to people can significantly help enterprises to alleviate the challenges of distributed teams, thereby enabling them to enhance agility.

Proxy product owner/business representative

Given that the customer/business is part of the team's ecosystem and given that the team's primary objective is to deliver value to the customer/business, the importance of having a PO as part of the team is immense. The PO provides business context to the team, prioritizes the requirements, and signs off the developed features. In a distributed setup, however, the PO is likely to be located remotely from most of...