Johannesburg, 19 Sep 2013
The software development world is seeing a second wave of enterprise agility starting to happen. The first wave saw development teams become agile. The second wave is focused on the entire enterprise - marketing, development, IT operations, finance, etc. Agile traditionally focused on development and breaking down the wall between business and development that existed (and still exists) in most enterprises. And it worked very well, says Jaco Viljoen, SAFe Program Consultant, IndigoCube.
Then organisations found that if you only optimise one area, you create more bottlenecks, because the rest of the enterprise is not equipped to deal with the improved efficiency and productivity of that one agile area. "So the next bottleneck became operations - and the wall between development and operations," Viljoen comments. "The drive to fix this has resulted in a new buzzword - DevOps - which aims to bridge the divide between development and operations and transform operations into an agile area too."
Organisations are now starting to look at enterprise agility from concept to cash - encompassing the entire value chain, not just departments. They're beginning to question if they are getting agility across all business units or just achieving local optimisations.
"Many have started looking at lean," says Viljoen. "Lean comes from lean manufacturing, most famously remembered from the Toyota Way."
Lean is a way of thinking about producing something (it has applications far beyond manufacturing) in a way that delivers the most value to the customer, with the minimum of waste.
"Lean is gaining more ground now, driven by things like Eric Reese's Lean Startup Concept and Donald Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow," Viljoen says. "Today, if we're talking about enterprise agility, we're talking about Lean, Agile, DevOps - all these come together here.
"Agile is not a binary thing," he expands, "it's not on or off. So, as it penetrates an enterprise, you get varying levels of agility. Scrum-driven Agile addresses projects and teams and has seen great success in the development arena. Businesses are traditionally plan-driven, and are managed as such. Scrum doesn't address programmes, portfolios or business management, and traditional plan management isn't agile. Plan-driven management and Scrum need to meet in the middle to drive Agile further into the organisation.
"A lot of companies have been through this and have gained experience on what works and doesn't - and this is how the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was developed," says Viljoen. "SAFe is built on top of Scrum and XP but talks about the things Scrum doesn't talk about at a programme and portfolio level. If you want to become more agile at a programme and portfolio level, combined with Scrum, then you should start looking at frameworks like SAFe."
SAFe is an accumulation of best practices that have been shown to work. It builds on existing Agile frameworks (such as Scrum, XP and Kanban), lean thinking and the principles of product development flow. SAFe's thought leader is Dean Leffingwell, who created it, and the framework is publicly available - you don't have to buy it, you can go online and start implementing - Scaled Agile, SAFe's caretaker organisation, gives it away for free, Viljoen comments.
"The overall goal of SAFe is a shorter, sustainable lead time from concept to cash - 'how fast can we get something from concept into production?'. It aims to help companies achieve faster time to market, in a sustainable fashion. In SAFe, they believe the only way you can scale Agile is to have really high-performing teams and good-quality code. SAFe values things like alignment, code quality, transparency and programme execution," Viljoen says.
IndigoCube has partnered with Scaled Agile to bring SAFe to South Africa. Jaco Viljoen is South Africa's first SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), having met the qualification criteria and completed the certification programme in Berlin, presented by SAFe creator Dean Leffingwell.
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