1. Digital Agility
The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile
Pearl Zhu
The Author of “Digital Master” Book Series
& “Future of CIO” Blog
WWW.PEARLZHU.COM
CIO MASTER
Digital Agility
DIGITAL MASTER

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3. Title: Digital Agility
Sub Title: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to
Being Agile
Author:
Pearl Zhu
ISBN: 978-1-4835727-8--9
Copyright Date:
June. 2016
About “Digital Agility”

4. Summary
The world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with
wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. Agile is
one of such powerful pillars to lead digital transformation and
enable the business to unleash its full potential. 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
● Renovate strategy execution continuum to improve effectiveness
● 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

5. Chapter 1 Agile is the State of Mind
Agile is the State of Mind
The Agile transformation is a change in
mindset. Agile mindset is about empathy,
people-centricity, and improvement. Agile is
not about free thinking or doing without
structure, Agile does not take less discipline,
but needs more engineering and management
discipline. You can not expect big bang
mindset change so you need to start with agile
philosophy and develop a set of best/next
practices.

6. Chapter 2 Agile Principles
Agility is not only the ability to create the changes, but
also the capability to adapt to changes. The principles
of agile can be used by individuals and non-
engineering groups as well.
Agile helps management immensely through the
power of collaboration, transparency, and feedback.
Agile is the culture as well. It is important to recognize
that moving to Agile may require a significant culture
change that affects the entire business. It’s a set of
principles to run today’s digital organizations.

7. Chapter 3 Agile Best/Next Practices
Many forward-looking organizations are shifting from
doing Agile to being Agile. Scaling agile needs to be
taken in several dimensions. It’s not only the number
of team members. There is also the number of teams,
the number of sites, the number of time zones, the
number of products, etc.
An even more importantly, how to follow the set of
agile principles and practice Agile up, to build an agile
leadership team or boardroom, and apply agile
philosophy to run an entire organization?

8. Chapter 4 The Pitfalls in Agile Movement
More and more organizations are on the journey from
doing Agile to being agile, and there are many pitfalls
on they way: What are the biggest problems for
people or companies when they decide to go Agile?
What is the hardest thing when you choose that
road? What are your biggest pains? What are the
causes of the failures? Who should take more
responsibility? The leadership or fellowship?
Agility won’t fix what being called “technical problem.”
It is a way to organize work. You still have to be good
at doing the work.

9. Chapter 5 Agile Dot Connections
Agility within and itself is a strategy. Agility is not only
the ability to create the changes, but also the
capability to adapt to changes. And agility is about
how to connect the dots in building a creative working
environment and shaping a customer-centric
organization.
Agile leverages the wisdom of the masses to scale up
and drive success. Agile dot-connection practices can
help anyone or any group focus their attention
effectively and take right actions towards a vision.

10. Chapter 6 Agile Measurement
Agile values and principles are best measured via
linking what you want to achieve and top business
goals. You have a set of well-defined values and
principles based on Agile Manifesto. They are about
what you believe and how you think. And you will
always have to tie these together to get the big
picture of your organizational agility.
In Agile, measure directly what you want to achieve,
what your organizational goals are like, some of the
key measures of Agile effectiveness are creating
value, timely delivery, teamwork and productivity,etc.

11. Chapter 7 Agile Maturity
“Being agile” considers the entire enterprise, not just
the projects. It is based on systemic principles: The
discipline of seeing “whole” which facilitates the rapid
creation of business value.
“Being agile” is dependent on the appropriate amount
of up-front architecture. “Being agile” acknowledges
and encourages the dynamics and emergent
properties of the project, team and environment. In
other words, “agile” that is standardized is not agile.
Adding Systems Thinking to agile projects is always
beneficial to improve agile maturity.

12. Chapter 8 Agile Debates
There are known known known unknown, unknown
unknown, either running an Agile project or managing
an agile business as a whole, do not think Agile is
just a software management methodology, or the
rigid engineering discipline. It is a digital philosophy
with a set of brief principles to run today’s digital
organization.
It is important to inspire creative thinking and
encourage free debating, with the goals to do the
right things and do them in the right way, to follow
agile principles and make continuous improvement in
agile practice and deliveries.

13. Conclusion
Agility involves the ecosystem.
● Agile is a CULTURE, not a process
● The twin goals of Agile transformation
are to increase value received and
decrease risk.
● Transformation is one thing. The state “to
be” is quite another.
● Agile is a mindset.
● Agiel is not just a business principle, but a
life principle.

14. Author: Pearl Zhu Digital is the Age of Innovation

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