Not agile delivery is the holy grail, but business agility is

Agile originated in the IT department: development teams organize themselves into tribes and work in sprints. Gradually, this tactic was adopted by other departments. Marketing, Finance and HR now also organize themselves as agile teams. By working on solutions iteratively, you move forward faster and can deal with changes more flexibly. Only: if everyone ‘sprints’ in different directions, organizations do not achieve their goals.

Agile delivery is just one piece of the puzzle

At best, several agile projects are merged and coordinated into ‘trains’. But, even then, fragmentation and nonalignment, or failure to properly align trains and sprints with an organization’s strategy, is a threat. Such lack of coordination is not just a kink, it poses a major risk. When everyone works in silos, you risk creating a situation where several well-executed projects run in parallel but lead nowhere. That has quite a few negative consequences:

• Agile practices are not aligned with the organization’s strategy
• Limited ability to adapt to changing market- or customer needs
• Projects that focus on the short term are not scalable and thus lead to ‘technical debt’
• Lack of standardization further drives up project costs
• Employees become discouraged because they find that projects lead nowhere

Taken together, this ensures that companies are not agile at all. They may win a battle here and there, but certainly not the whole war.

Enterprise architecture provides streamlining

To avoid all these problems, it is necessary to integrate enterprise architecture into the agile transformation to align strategic objectives with the changing technological landscape. That way, agile frameworks are applied with architectural guidance. As a result, all agile projects can be aligned with that strategy and work not only efficiently, but also effectively. Individual successes thus also contribute to a collective triumph. 

For agile teams, the chills may run down their spines when they hear this. Indeed, setting a strategy first and making agile projects subservient to it seems more like a ‘waterfall’ approach than an agile way of working. Or: Compliant governance frameworks need to be installed, but without blocking teams’ autonomy. No simple task… a delicate balancing act at the best of times.

The role of the Agile Project Management Office (PMO) and the Transformation Office

As we wrote in previous blogs, architecture is not a thick book that you write and then put on the shelf. It is a living document that can be adjusted. It is also a manual against which you constantly test projects. The Project Management Office plays a key role in this, working closely with the Transformation Office. 

Good collaboration between PMO and Transformation Office ensures that each project contributes to the strategic roadmap. PMO monitors the progress of each project, provides advice and promotes communication between the various agile teams and the organization as a whole. When the PMO and Transformation Office work well, they provide the glue between individual projects and the organization’s strategic vision. They provide greater strategic focus, alignment between transformation initiatives and operational agile initiatives, collaboration across silos and provide governance adapted to the need for agility.

It is immediately clear that this is challenging but necessary to ensure maximum impact from transformation initiatives and agile projects, both of which have the goal of making the organization deliver more value.

How the agency approach helps 

The balancing act we described above is ACOMPANY’s cup of tea. As a digital transformation and innovation agency, we are able to think strategically as well as tactically. Through its knowledge of various disciplines (Enterprise Architecture, PMO, Transformation Office), ACOMPANY ensures that there is one overarching story. Thanks to its agency approach, ACOMPANY looks at the project from various angles and co-creates a solution tailored to the organization. 

ACOMPANY has a sharp focus on the value delivered by a transformation. That’s why we always aim for a fast time-to-value: by focusing on the right things, results are delivered quickly. That makes it easy to bring the entire organization along in the transformation. Everyone notices an immediate positive impact. 

Agility is more than a box to be checked off just because agility is hype. In fact, agility then becomes a long-term philosophy.