If agility is a permanent business necessity, why do most organisations rely solely on Agile methods — and what else should they be doing?
Change in technology, markets, regulation, and customer expectations is accelerating — and shows no sign of slowing. This leads to a deceptively simple but important conclusion: agility is not a temporary challenge to be solved once, but a stable, permanent requirement that organisations must continuously invest in. Yet most responses focus narrowly on Agile software delivery methods, which address only one dimension of a much larger challenge spanning strategy, organisation design, process engineering, product development, and technology.
This white paper maps the full landscape of organisational agility and proposes three complementary strategies for achieving it in the IT and systems domain. The first is doing less — leveraging packages, component libraries, frameworks, and industry reference models to reduce custom build effort. The second is doing things faster — through Agile methods, DevOps, domain-specific modelling, and code generation, with an honest assessment of the preconditions and dangers of each. The third, and most distinctive, is making more flexible things — designing systems that are runtime-adaptable or model-driven, so that business changes can be accommodated without requiring new development cycles at all. The paper argues this third approach is underutilised and, in many contexts, more powerful than the other two combined.
A final section addresses the challenge most organisations actually face: how to achieve agility when large, poorly documented legacy application landscapes underpin current operations. The paper introduces software visualisation and code harvesting techniques as a practical path to legacy modernisation that doesn't require a costly and risky big-bang replacement.
Pages: 32
Originally published as a white paper by Graham McLeod, Inspired.org, December 2017.