Integration Consulting

With larger organizations undertaking agile project management and development methods in significant ways, issues around "agile integration" are becoming more and more important to successful agile implementation. Agile integration involves all the enterprise and organizational issues that must be addressed for agile practices and principles to become fully integrated into an organization's ways of doing business. They fall into six categories: organization, process, culture, alignment, governance, and compliance. Failing to recognize and address these issues can make the difference between successful agile projects and unsuccessful agile organizations.

Agile approaches emphasize cross-functional teams of developers, testers, business or product specialists, technical specialists, and others. But many companies, particularly those that have employed waterfall processes previously, are organized functionally. Dealing with reorganizing and the different roles necessary in an agile environment is a difficult transition for many.

Processes for hiring and performance evaluation, architectural and design reviews, database logical and physical design, and standardization can be effected in a transition to an agile environment. Changing legal and contracting processes that have evolved over many years to support waterfall methods can also produce a painful transition point. An agile organization, over time, creates a culture that emphasizes intense customer interaction, self-organization, effective leadership, participatory decision making, a focus on value, collaboration, respect for individuals, continuous learning, a lean perspective, and more. Addressing these cultural issues can be a critical part of agile implementation. Agile's emphasis on small-chunk iterative development, delivering increments of customer value, collaboration, and self-organizing teamwork, can have an impact on both business strategy and enterprise architecture, and vice versa. Creating smaller projects and leveraging on the flexibility of agile methods can support greater business and architectural flexibility if these areas are properly aligned.

Governance, including both governing project delivery from an executive level and managing the organization's portfolio of projects, is another area where integration issues arise. Often, reporting processes need to change in an organization to reflect an emphasis on agility in addition to more traditional reporting measures. These, in turn, impact budgeting and expenditure processes and controls. Budgeting, funding, and portfolio management processes may need to be altered to create an agile organization.

Finally, organizations face a plethora of compliance programs, internal and external, that must be addressed. Determining how to meet compliance requirements without undermining the "lean" tenants of agile methods can be a difficult undertaking. Large organizations may encounter most, if not all, of the issues identified. Solving these integration issues will be as difficult as, if not more than, implementing agile practices within development groups. Cutter Consortium can assist in identifying the most critical of these integration issues for your organization and developing a plan for addressing each of them.

For more information on customizing a consulting engagement for your organization, contact Jack Wainwright, +1 781-641-5122 or jwainwright@cutter.com.