Agile for the Enterprise: From Agile Teams to Agile Organizations

by Jim Highsmith

Agile development, and in particular Extreme Programming (XP), began its evolution at the development team level. Agile development appealed first to software developers, and as successful projects emerged from these teams, managers and executives began to notice. However, the growing visibility of agile methods has created a new set of issues -- challenges or opportunities, depending on your viewpoint. These issues are geared to executives and the enterprise and are focused on the question "How do we move from agile projects to agile organizations?" In organization after organization, senior executives have questions. These questions range from how agile project methods fit with other methods to how iterative development can be managed within the traditional lifecycle approach to projects. Executives want to know how agile methods affect them directly and which implementation details they don't need to worry about.