Be an Amazing CIO with Agile Methodology Volume I
CIO’s are always under demands to support swift-evolving digital business settings but are stumbling upon the conventional project and development approaches incongruous, according to Gartner, Inc. Enterprises are progressively more turning to agile development to fasten up projects and exemplify their significance.
Most CIO’s realize that the old waterfall approach to project deliverance just wasn’t working, and they needed to find multiple methods of breaking things into pieces. They didn’t have enough qualified expertise at the program manager level to lead these multi-year programs. They become so convoluted they had to use agile or modular development and break things into pieces in order to be triumphant. There have been some good successes and where people see success, they look at that as a way to potentially build on it.
Proper deployment of agile methods has the competence to transform IT-business relationships and have a foremost affirmative impact on IT value delivery. Conversely, the assessment will be delivered only if the CIO and the complete IT management team are dedicated to the culture change that is essential for success.
If executed well, agile development can be an integral part of the portfolio of methods that the CIO utilizes to deal with increasing business demand for innovation if done ghastly, agile development will create a lot additional problems than it unravels.
CIO’s are inherently positioned to facilitate the transition to new digital business models based on Agile processes and configurations and aided by digital innovation. But the reality is that many senior IT executives have difficulty planning out where to begin and how to proceed. On the one hand, they can draw from a rich arsenal of Agile approaches, tools and examples for software development, however on the other hand, it is not always understandable how to turn this knowledge into an actionable framework for enhancing agility above and ahead of application development.
CIO’s functioning at the nexus between business and IT are intrinsically positioned to drive the revolution to digitization and greater organizational agility however reality exhibits that many senior IT executives have difficulty working out where to begin and how to advance. They can illustrate on Agile — a rich management framework consisting of principles, ideas, structures, approaches and tools for software development, including Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Kanban, Lean Software Development, variations of these and more. On the other hand, it is often complicated to develop agile capabilities beyond software development if business vendors and other IT stakeholders are not acquainted with the similar Agile approaches and regulations.
CIO’s have always been conventional to run an efficient and effective IT organization that supports the business but more currently they are supposed to also identify and apply IT innovation directly into creating differentiated products and services. Even more exigent, the rate of change is much quicker and time to market is the most significant metric. Today’s examples of such agility-enabling technologies and solutions include mobile and cloud-based digital platforms for product progress, process automation and digital business; analytics for accelerating decision support; and social media for allowing faster communication and deeper engagement with customer
The paradigm set by organizations such as Google, Facebook and Netflix shows how firms can utilize iterative progress to continuously augment products and develop market share. This is already being monitored by business and technology heads in other firms and they are querying if they can do the same thing to compel development in their own organizations. Individuals comprehend that IT is right down the middle of everything a firm does, and that conventional software release phases of once a year, or even once a quarter, are not capable to keep up with the swiftness of change and innovation in recent times.
Identical to the word “athlete,” the word “Agile” grips your attention; it sounds great. Although moving from wish to reality always tests individual’s dedication. A lot of firms are struggling with the all-too-common reaction of, “That’s not the method we do things here…” Agile are appealing and enthralling to companies, but then there is the tendency to immediately criticize new ideas — we’re all inclined to it. As soon as someone proposes a new way of doing something, we all think of 10 reasons why that can’t be done or why it won’t work. To begin with, agility is not just a good idea; it’s now supported by law — the law of probability. This law says if a firm can’t keep up with rapid rates of change in the world then its probability of achievement is getting lesser and lesser every day. And since firms need IT infrastructure and applications to function, just as human bodies need a nervous system and muscles to be in motion, IT agility is crucial for a firm to achieve business agility.
Last few years back, software tools have made possible for business analysts to determine and track progress on Agile projects and to witness the performance of Agile teams in widely disbanded geographical locations. That makes Agile methods more viable for large firms. A pervading sensitivity exists throughout business that just about everything else has been tested and IT groups are still not really keeping up with the accumulation of user requests. Users are beginning to set off around IT and do their own things using SaaS, social media and mashups to place together systems. So why not give Agile methodology really a try?
Agile practices present the best means to advance communication and alliance involving business and IT. Meaningful innovation always starts with communication and collaboration. Another object that Agile practices facilitate is the capability to try out new ideas and explore opportunities quickly without investing a lot of money up front. With more conventional approaches, firms invest a lot of time and money planning candid before they begin rather new. This is expensive and since most new ideas don’t pan out in the end, this traditional method makes it quite cumbersome for firms to implement out enough new ideas in a year to find that petite handful of ideas that do work out and distribute the profits they are looking for.
In this volatile and erratic economic environment, firms require to Think big, start small and deliver quickly. That’s the best way to keep up, adapt and respond to change, and find the prospects they are looking for. Agility means letting go of slow, deliberate decision-making in retrospective of swift, repeatedly-tested decisions. That is the reason “Agile methods” are so apt for energizing organizations and aiding them develop innovative products and services.
