Regardless of the industry, digital transformation is an important part of most corporate agendas for 2018. Successful digital transformation, encompassing your current business, partners and both current and prospective customers, isn't always easy. However, adopting an enterprise-wide Agile methodology can help ease the burden and deliver discernible ROI much faster.
Agile has the power to radically accelerate a business's digital transformation strategy and initiatives, while allowing IT to make a significant impact on an organization's bottom line. It shifts focus to delivering value for the enterprise, rather than get bogged down with proving constant change.
Organizations are now starting to move away from the top-down process of application lifecycle management (ALM) and waterfall methods, while Agile methodology, which started as a bottom-up process, has gained momentum and flourished under the DevOps mindset. But introducing Agile at scale across the enterprise, encompassing multiple teams and divisions with top-down and bottom-up buy in, is no simple task.
When done right, Agile methods can create more value for the business, allow for better alignment with business and tech operations and increase software release frequency where collaboration is key.
Creating clear value streams also makes it easier to understand the investment in an initiative, while triggering collaboration among teams. Enterprises that navigate this successfully can synchronize business processes, along with test, development and delivery teams, to ensure greater transparency and better overall value for the enterprise.
In a report, The State of Agile 2017: Agile at Scale(December, 2017), Forrester explored Enterprise Agility adoption and growth. Surveying 232 software development executives and professionals – from end users and system integrators through to software vendors – Forrester's survey reveals that despite Agile's known benefits, it is yet to be fully embraced by the enterprise, with only 40 percent of ISVs claiming to have 75 percent of their teams working in Agile. Contributing factors include resistance to behavioral change, a skills gap, limited budgets and DevOps and Agile transformation silos. And although DevOps has helped to accelerate Agile adoption, Agile development still lacks scale across teams, divisions and the overall enterprise.
The survey shows that 71 percent of respondents noted improved customer experience when switching to Agile, with 66 percent seeing better business and IT alignment. Overall, there is encouraging growth with the unified adoption of both DevOps and Agile.
Read Embracing Agile Methodology for Successful Digital Transformation - Part 2, outlining the top considerations for companies to ensure Agile at scale.
