This is the next in a series of Advisors that attempts to answer the question "What do agile executives and managers actually do?" A previous Advisor identified a number of practices or areas of responsibility for agile leaders (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009). Here, I'll address helping teams understand and deliver on business and project objectives. This sounds pretty mundane, but I frequently find when coaching teams or facilitating a project chartering session that teams are not aligned with overall objectives: customer, business, or quality.

In a previous Advisor on leading organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009), I identified a number of practices or areas of responsibility for agile leaders. These were aligning agile transformation efforts to business strategy; helping teams understand and deliver on business and project objectives; creating an agile performance management system; facilitating a decentralized, empowered, collaborative workplace; fostering an adaptable product line and product architecture; creating an agile proficiency framework; fostering both proactive and reactive organizational adaptation processes; and creating guidelines, training; and support for agile processes, practices, and tools. I'll address proactive and reactive organizational processes in this Advisor.

Here in Part II, we will discuss problems related to globally distributed teams of software developers, because the data indicates that this is where many of the problems will emerge as the new decade unfolds. As we have already noted, globalized and distributed software development (DSD) has already affected more than half of all software development organizations, and there is no reason not to expect this trend to continue. In fact, dealing with invisible teams has already become one of the more critical challenges for globalized software organizations.

If agility is about delivering customer value by being flexible, then how can adherence to a traditional scope, schedule, and cost plan be the best way to measure performance? It can't be. With pervasive change the norm, we can no longer "follow the plan with minimal changes." Instead, our focus needs to be on successfully adapting to inevitable changes. We need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to an Agile Triangle that focuses on Value, Quality, and Constraints. In this webinar, Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Practice Director Jim Highsmith will explore the necessity for and the rationale behind moving to this new set of agile performance measures.