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

Enhancing agility is not the same as Agile transformation


Many enterprises are initiating Agile transformation initiatives, with the intent to enhance agility at enterprise level. However, Agile transformations usually mean scaling Agile practices across teams using a prescribed framework, implementing DevOps, changing the rigid structure to another rigid structure, and similar types of changes which not only aim for a fixed end state, but are also blindly copied from what purportedly is working for other enterprises.

The word transformation indicates moving from the current state to a new state, which is predicted in advance. This goes against the core philosophy of agility, which is to assume that a) the end state can be predicted in advance, and b) it is OK to remain in a fixed state.

Jurgen Appelo, author of the book, Management 3.0, has summarized an enterprise with high agility as follows:

"In the 21st century, successful organizations are hard and soft. Fast and slow. Solid and liquid...