Tehran(Bazaar)- Scott Ambler,Vice President and Chief Scientist, Disciplined Agile, Project Management Institute in interview with Bazaar News Agency said: To improve infrastructure for agility, you will need to train your staff in basic agile strategies.
Scott Ambler is the Vice President, Chief Scientist of Disciplined Agile at Project Management Institute. Mr. Ambler leads the evolution of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, and is the (co)-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit as well as the Agile Modeling (AM) and Agile Data (AD) methodologies. Mr. Ambler (co-)authors of several books, including Choose Your WoW!, An Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, and The Object Primer 3rd Edition.
Following is the full text of the interview:
Bazaar:What effect do organizational agility processes have on their performance?
Ambler:Agility focuses increased collaboration and communication between people who are working in an iterative and incremental manner. You will improve your overall efficiency as the result of better collaboration and communication through a better understanding of who is doing what work, how they’re doing it, and when. It also enables you to reduce management overhead as less management direction is needed when people collaborate regularly.
Working iteratively increases your opportunities for feedback, which in turn increases the chance that your staff are doing what they need to be doing. Working incrementally enables you to deliver value to your customers sooner and regularly, increasing your ability to meet their needs and thereby generate revenue or savings.
Bazaar:What should be done to create optimal infrastructure for agility?
Ambler:Your organizational infrastructure will never be optimal because your environment is always evolving – the demands of your customers change, your competitors change, and the underlying technologies change. Because of this, your goal should be to become a learning organization, constantly improve, and actively seek opportunities to get better at what you do.
This is the focus of Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, to provide you with the guidance to understand what your process options are so that you can choose the right way of working (WoW) for the situation that you currently face. Your organization is unique as are your teams and your people, and as a result you want a fit-for-purpose WoW that is right for you.
To improve infrastructure for agility, you will need to train your staff in basic agile strategies. This will help them to achieve initial benefits from agile. Staff should also be trained in DA, and you should invest in agile coaching so that they can continue improving. Many organizations realize that their existing tooling and IT infrastructure is lacking, so investment in this space will also likely be needed.
The critical thing to recognize is that you need to be prepared to make ongoing investments in improvement – this is never free, never easy, and never complete.
Bazaar:What processes does agility involve? In terms of cost, how much is the return?
Ambler:Every area within your organization will work differently and as a result will have their own WoW. For example, your software teams will work differently than your human resource team, which works differently than your legal team, which works differently than your procurement team, and so on.
In DA we teach you how to improve continuously in via small changes over time, we call this strategy Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI). Each of these changes should bring some benefit to you. The return on each change will vary. How big of a problem are you solving? How much is the cost of the change? It depends.
One of the skills that we teach is to focus on your most pressing problem, identify the most viable change that will address that problem, and then try the new WoW in your environment to see if it works for you. If it does, adopt the new WoW. If it doesn’t, try something else. With this strategy, you are constantly improving.
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