Agile Business Management

Overview

This category contains topics associated with applying Agile Business Management in organizations.  These topics are appropriate for:

  1. Agile Product Owners or Product Managers – who need to better understand how to effectively perform the Agile Product Owner role. The Product Owner role in Agile is not well-understood and most of the people who might be selected to perform that role are not well-prepared for what it requires
  2. Business Analysts – who work in an Agile environment and need to optimize their skills to provide a high level of value in that environment
  3. Business Sponsors – who want to learn more about Agile Project Management in order to provide more effective leadership for the initiatives that they are responsible for
  4. Senior-level Executives – who are interested in making their business more agile and want to develop a well-integrated approach to fit an Agile development process to their business

Why Is This Difficult?

Agile business management can be difficult and making Agile work for your business is a real challenge:

  • There is widespread knowledge that exists about almost every possible aspect of how to optimize an Agile development process at a team level; however,
  • The knowledge about how to make Agile work at an enterprise level is much more limited.
  • There have been numerous failures in trying to make Agile work at an enterprise level and there are some significant misconceptions behind these failures

Another big challenge is aligning the overall business strategy and the development strategy:

  • At the business level, the approach should be designed around what makes the most sense for the company’s business
  • That may or may not be exactly the same as the approach used to manage projects at the development level
  • The people designing the enterprise-level strategy need to be able to understand the business strategy as well as the development strategy and fit the two together
  • It isn’t necessarily just a matter of forcing the entire company to become more agile

This is a rapidly evolving area that needs to be better understood.  Many Agile training programs address Agile from a development perspective only and training programs like CSPO for business people are limited to the “mechanics” of doing Agile.

Related Articles

Please check the articles associated with this category for more detail:

What Are the Critical Skills of a Scrum Product Owner in Agile?

Agile Business Management / By

I recently participated in an online discussion on the question of “What are the Critical Skills of a Scrum Product Owner?” This is a very good question because the role of a Product Owner is not very well-understood. The actual role that a Product Owner plays can vary significantly in the real-world depending on the …

What Are the Critical Skills of a Scrum Product Owner in Agile? Read More »

What is Systems Thinking and Why is it Important?

Agile Business Management / By

Understanding “what is systems thinking” is important to developing a deeper understanding of Agile. I’m an engineer at heart. I’ve been trained to analyze problems objectively and come up with well-thought-out solutions. That approach comes naturally to me; however, it is something that needs to be learned and reinforced. Why Is Systems Thinking Important? An …

What is Systems Thinking and Why is it Important? Read More »

Agile Business Strategy – Making Agile Work for Your Business

Agile Business Management / By

How do you go about developing an Agile business strategy to make Agile work for your business? Many Agile coaching and consulting companies take what I would call a “developer-centric” approach to Agile: The effort is heavily focused on team-level capabilities and is primarily oriented around improving the development process There’s nothing wrong with that, …

Agile Business Strategy – Making Agile Work for Your Business Read More »