Digital Agility: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile

by Pearl Zhu

The world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. Agility is one of such powerful pillars to leap digital transformation and enable the business to unleash its full potential. Organizational agility is about to create and react to changes. It is about to take into account any change in the environment and transform the organization to survive, grow, and transform. It is about to respond to emergent events proactively. The purpose of the book “Digital Agility” is to:

Share the insight about agile philosophy and mindsets
Clarify a set of agile principles and disciplines
Develop the best and next agile practices to scale up
Describe potential agile pitfalls and how to prevent them
Connect the agile dots to build a creative working environment
Measure the right things about agile and measure them right
Sum up agile maturity from multidimensional perspectives
Inspire healthy debates to move agile up to the next level of maturity

The term ‘Agile’ is derived from ‘The Manifesto for Agile Software Development’ which describes a collaborative way of working based on a set of twelve principles that has come to mean early delivery of business value. The problem is people do not have a profound understanding of Agile principles and philosophy behind a set of Agile framework or tools. Most of the times they use the word "agile" when in fact they are talking about agile software development. The best way to fail is thinking that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Agile needs to be the philosophy to perceive multidimensional business values. Make the effort at the leadership and portfolio level to qualify and quantify value in terms of both strategic value and tactical value; direct revenue and indirect (vision/values/culture) terms is the first step to crafting high-level strategic intents. When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier. Once benefits of agile are visible and understood, a domino effect takes over, the organization as a whole becomes “agiler.”

From “doing Agile to being agile” is a rocky road, not a straight path: Agile is direction, not a destination. Transforming to “Being Agile” means the business knows the direction they want to go on, and as people start “putting on” the agile mindset, discover new ways of working, collaborating, delivering value, they inspect and adapt in that journey by overcoming the frictions and challenges. You have to keep things rolling, to make agile not just a methodology to manage projects, but a principle instilled into a healthy culture to run the business more effectively. To move from Waterfall to Agile is not an act of one day. It is a journey. And as long as the journey is coming to a place where we can call the organization actually Agile, Waterfall and Agile do co-exist. Some organizations stop moving and remain in the hybrid state and some just turn back to go on the previous state of the waterfall and few actually reach the destination of the Agile world. So, hybrid organizations are the reality. Agile is neither just a methodology nor a set of practices, Agile is a state of mind. It’s the basic underlying principles of Agile! You can not expect big bang mindset change so you need to start with agile philosophy and some initial practices that pay off and reinforce, a mindset change is more difficult of a change and involves coaching, training, teaching and important discussions around what Agile is to the team, department, and company.

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 7, 2016

About the author

Pearl Zhu has more than 25 years of technical and business working experience in Information Technology, E-commerce, international trading, etc. My blog has reached #10000 blog posting with 100,000,000 views wordwidely.

She is a digital visionary who can capture technological foresight, business insight, and digital leadership philosophy from multidimensional lenses and global perspectives. She also is a forward-looking digital leader who advocates business innovation and culture evolution relentlessly.

She is the author of "Digital Master" book series (28+ books), which include: "Digital Master –Debunk the Myth of Enterprise Digital Maturity," "CIO Master – Unleash the Digital Potential of IT," "Digital Valley - Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence," "Digital Agility - The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile," "Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity," "Talent Master -199+ Questions to See Talent from Different Angles," "Digitizing Boardroom - The Multidimensional Aspects of Digital Ready Boards," "Thinkingaire - 100 Game-Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future," "Change Insight -Change as Ongoing Capability to Fuel Digital Transformation," "IT Innovation -Running IT for the Digital Age," "Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation in a Structural Way," "100 Creativity Ingredients -Everyone's Playbook to Unlock Creativity," "Decision Master -The Art and Science of Decision-Making," "Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business," "Digital IT - 100 Q&As," "Digital Capability - Building Lego-Like Capability Into Business Competency," and "Performance Master - Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance," and "Digital Boardroom- 100 Q&As," "Digital FIt: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit," "100 Digital Rules," and "12 Digital Personas," "Problem-Solving Master: Frame Problems Systematically, Solve Problems Creatively," "Digital Maturity: Taking a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioining to Delight," "Digital Pitfalls: How to Overcome Pitfalls on the way to Going Digital," "Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the RIght Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift," and received very positive feedback.