Design IT Organizations for Agility at Scale Aspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organization. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT Effectiveness” that is as practical as it is valuable. The author shows how structural, political, operational, and cultural facets of organization design influence overall IT agility—and how you can promote better collaboration across diverse functions, from sales and marketing to product development, and engineering to IT operations. Through real examples, he helps you evaluate and improve organization designs that enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the key ingredients for a highly motivated workforce. You’ll find “close range” coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organizational norms, communication, and culture. For each, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where your organization stands, and clear direction for making improvements. Ready to optimize the performance of your IT organization or digital business? Here are practical solutions for the long term, and for right now. Govern for value over predictability Organize for responsiveness, not lowest cost Clarify accountability for outcomes and for decisions along the way Strengthen the alignment of autonomous teams Move beyond project teams to capability teams Break down tool-induced silos Choose financial practices that are free of harmful side effects Create and retain great teams despite today’s “talent crunch” Reform metrics to promote (not prevent) agility Evolve culture through improvements to structure, practices, and leadership—and careful, deliberate interventions

Chapter 1 looks at your role as a manager. How will your responsibilities change under Agile Business Management? What techniques can you use to manage your staff? Chapter 2 discusses your organisation’s relationship and interaction with its customers. What are their needs and goals, and how can you work together to achieve them? Chapter 3 provides the organisational context in which Agile Business Management operates. It discusses lean management structures and the techniques to manage different types of staff, teams and organisations. Chapter 4 looks at how you and your team work the “agile way” and describes tools and techniques to help optimise workflow, exploit change and manage customer requirements. The book closes with a look at associated financial models that support your Agile organisation, the processes you can use to run an Agile Business Management transformation, and the first steps to take towards that transformation.

Discover how to implement and operate in an Agile manner at every level of your enterprise and at every point from idea to delivery. Learn how Agile-mature organizations adapt nimbly to microchanges in market conditions. Learn cutting-edge practices and concepts as you extend your implementation of Agile through the entire enterprise to meet customer needs. Veteran Agile coach Mario Moreira argues that two critical conditions must be conscientiously cultivated at a company before it can expect to reap in full measure the business benefits of mature Agile. First, individuals at every level must be committed to the mindset and the implementation of practices rigorously focused on delivering value to the customer. Second, all employees must be empowered to take ownership. This holistic transformation wrenches the status quo and provokes a strong focus where customers and employees matter. What You'll Learn Establish an idea pipeline to quickly and productively evolve customer value through all levels of the enterprise Incorporate a discovery mindset—experimental, incremental, design, and divergent thinking—and fast feedback loops to increase the odds that what you build aligns more closely to what customer wants Leverage Lean Canvas, personas, story mapping, value stream mapping, Cost of Delay, servant leadership, self-organization, and more to deliver optimum value to customers Use continuous agile budgeting and idea pipelines at the senior levels of the enterprise to enable you to adapt to the speed of the market Reinvent human resources, portfolio management, finance, and many areas of management toward new roles in the enablement of customer value Map a top-to-bottom and end-to-end holistic view of your Agile galaxy to gauge where you are today and where you’d like to go in your Agile future Be truly Agile throughout your enterprise, focused on customer value and employees above all else Who This Book Is For Executives and senior management; sponsors of Agile within a company; ScrumMasters and Agile coaches, champions, and consultants; project management and quality assurance officers (PMOs and AMOs); portfolio managers; product managers and product owners; marketing and business managers; functional, middle, and resource managers; engineering heads and managers; cross-functional engineering/scrum teams; and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists

Given today's context of tough change, organizations need to be able to innovate as well as develop and implement strategy quickly and efficiently. The key to this is agility - a set of capabilities that can help organizations to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. At the same time, resilience is also essential if benefits are going to endure over the longer term and if employees are to be kept on board. The Agile Organization focuses on how to build both agility and resilience at individual, team and organizational levels. It draws on a wealth of research, including the lived experience and learning of managers and HR and organization development (OD) professionals to show how it is possible to 'square the circle', becoming more sustainably agile while also enhancing employee engagement and resilience. The Agile Organization showcases the latest thinking - new organizational models, ground-breaking themes and case studies - that illustrate how organizations are addressing the challenge of developing organizational agility. Packed with helpful checklists and practice pointers, this book is a 'go to' guide for senior leaders and managers, HR and OD specialists who want to help bring about organizational transformation and create the new resiliently agile 'business as usual'.

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.

In today's volatile and ambiguous world, organizations need to have the capacity and flexibility to respond rapidly to changes in their environment, both internally and externally. The key to retaining this competitive advantage is agility, a set of capabilities that help organizations adapt with the full co-operation of their employees. Packed with helpful checklists, tips and advice, The Agile Organization is a practical blueprint to building both agility and resilience at individual, team and organizational levels. This revised second edition contains a new chapter on the latest approaches to agile organization design in light of digitization and customer-centricity, as well as new and updated case studies from the University of California, Berkeley, the UK National Health Service (NHS), SNC-Lavalin's Atkins business and General Electric (GE). It remains the 'go to' guide for HR and OD specialists, senior leaders and managers who want to help bring about organizational transformation and build a sustainably agile business while enhancing employee engagement and resilience.

To thrive in today’s rapidly changing, global, dynamic business environment characterized by constant change and disruption, organizations must be able to adapt and innovate to maintain their competitive edge. Organization Design: Creating Strategic & Agile Organizations prepares students to make smart strategic decisions when designing and redesigning organizations. Structured around Galbraith’s Star ModelTM, the text explores five facets of organization design: strategy, structure, processes, people, and rewards. Author Donald L. Anderson distills contemporary and classic research into practical applications and best practices. Cases, exercises, and a simulation activity provide multiple opportunities for students to practice making design decisions. Includes an innovative organization design simulation activity that puts students in the role of a design practitioner!