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

Values aligned to agility


Companies that have a high level of agility have a common pattern of enterprise values. These values are not only a sign of high agility but are also enablers to enhancing agility. Values can be broadly categorized into internal-oriented values, that is, how people inside the company treat each other, and external-oriented values, namely, how the enterprise treats its external entities and how it expects to be seen by the external world. These values may overlap with each other.

Internal-oriented values

Some of the methodologies under Agile have explicitly specified the values that enhance agility. Scrum has specified the following values, along with their meanings: focus, courage, openness, commitment, and respect [xii]. Extreme Programming (XP) has specified the following values, along with their meanings: simplicity, communication, feedback, respect, and courage. [xiii]

There is also a view that the Agile Manifesto reflects four key values of agility. Some other...