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

Significance


There is a common misconception that having agility means no processes or that processes are not important. This view comes from the first tenet of the Agile Manifesto, covered in Chapter 2, From Agile to Agility, which states, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

What is often forgotten about is reading this tenet in the context of the last sentence in the Manifesto, which states, "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." Hence, the Manifesto is explicitly stating that there is value in processes and tools (the items on the right), and that there is more value in individuals and interactions (the item on the left).

It is important to understand why the creators of the Agile Manifesto gave relatively less importance to processes and tools, in comparison to individuals and interactions. In enterprises that were modelled the mechanistic way, as elaborated on earlier in this book, the focus was largely on...