Sriram Narayan's Blog, page 3

Do you scale Agile vertically or horizontally?

Most attempts to scale Agile struggle because the IT leadership attempts to scale up (vertical) rather than scale out (horizontal). Scale-up is old school management. It involves context-free management by numbers, standardized metrics, reports and dashboards and workforce motivation by targets and incentives. Inside IT, this approach usually ends up scaling supervision (not management) without improving IT performance. This is why we find managers functioning as supervisors and Scrum masters...

Team Design

Here's a free sample chapter on "Team Design" from my book. This chapter explores the following:

"Before asking how I can make my current set of teams work better together, ask whether they are the right configuration of teams."

However, middle managers usually shy away from asking the latter question because they feel it is beyond their pay grade. Nevertheless, it is necessary to address this question if we are to scale agility and make IT more responsive as a whole.Get the book: www...

Rework IT for digital success

In an earlier post, I had argued how IT has become strategic owing to the demands of a digital business. Strategic IT cannot justify itself with IT metrics such as velocity or even with delivering to plan. It has to make a difference to business outcomes. IT agility takes on a new meaning in this light. It is not enough to claim that our development teams are agile. Engineering agility and delivery process agility are necessary but not sufficient for digital success. Read furtherGet the book:...

Agile over Lean

“That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
A number of reviewers suggested (in good faith) that I use “Lean” instead of “Agile” in the title of my book in order to improve its marketability. Apparently, Lean is in whereas Agile is jaded. However, the strong people-orientation credentials of Agile are core to the solutions I propose. I’d like to expand on this and some other reasons in this post which is also meant as a defense of Agile over...

Why is IT getting in-sourced?

Key thoughts: (full post)
Ten years ago, many businesses did not consider IT to be a core competency. But it's strategic now. Like it or not, businesses are now forced to pay greater attention to IT. The attention economy is largely digital, and IT systems mediate the relationship between attention-hungry sellers and spoilt-for-choice buyers.When IT becomes strategic, we can no longer evaluate the success of IT efforts using IT metrics (e.g. did we deliver to plan?). Strategic IT has to m...

A “definition of done” for Agile at scale

It seems everyone wants to scale Agile. Many say they have done so already. But there are different views on what the end state looks like. What does it mean to have scaled Agile? For many, it simply means replicating certain practices across all development teams. Although this may improve the internal quality of software, it won’t help improve overall IT performance as perceived by the business.
Agilists advocate that every story must have acceptance criteria. What are the acceptance criteri...

What really hinders Agile at scale

Update: 27-May-2015
Here's the full video of my talk:
Older post:
Organizational agility is required in order to scale Agile. It requires changes to IT structure, operations and governance. This is different from engineering and process agility that development teams focus on. I’ll cover this using real examples in my talk at Agile India 2015 tomorrow (25th March) at 3:30pm.



Get the book: www.agileorgdesign.com Sriram Narayan.

Scaling Agile

Organizational agility is required in order to scale Agile. It requires changes to IT structure, operations and governance. This is different from engineering and process agility that development teams focus on. I’ll cover this using real examples in my talk at Agile India 2015 tomorrow (25th March) at 3:30pm.



Get the book: www.agileorgdesign.com Sriram Narayan.

Agile is liberal, SAFe is conservative and their marriage will be rocky

Do we need a Big-Agile framework? This was the topic of a recent discussionon a LinkedIn group. Scrum, for example, may be viewed as a small-Agile framework. It suggests (prescribes?) rituals, practices, metrics and objectives for a development team. Many teams have adopted Scrum and realized its benefits. Then again, it is common to find people who wield Scrum certifications without a real understanding of software development. They do more damage than good on teams.
So can we extrapolate thi...

Big-Agile

Do we need a Big-Agile framework? This was the topic of a recent discussionon a LinkedIn group. Scrum, for example, may be viewed as a small-Agile framework. It suggests (prescribes?) rituals, practices, metrics and objectives for a development team. Many teams have adopted Scrum and realized its benefits. Then again, it is common to find people who wield Scrum certifications without a real understanding of software development. They do more damage than good on teams.
So can we extrapolate thi...