Moving agile beyond it

1. Moving agile beyond IT: The secret to successful
software delivery
Creating an agile enterprise requires more than just implementing agile
methodologies within IT. CIOs must spread the gospel to encourage
participation from IT’s business colleagues.
Ed Toner expects his IT workers to embrace agile principles, but he also wants his
business-side colleagues to do the same.
So much so that Toner, CIO for the State of Nebraska, stipulates agile principles
(specifically the need for their ongoing participation in software development and
deployment) in the contracts IT signs with the various state departments it serves.
“‘Success of the project is solely dependent on your involvement in this project,’ that’s
what the contract says,” he explains, noting that most department heads now
understand that either they become partners in the process or accept the potential for
less successful projects.
That’s the reality, Toner says.
“We had one group who just wanted to send requirements; he put nothing into it so he
had nothing to complain about. That’s one extreme. But we have others who’ll stop by
to just see how things are going, and those are the very successful projects because
they take so much ownership,” he adds.
Like many CIOs today, Toner has brought the agile mindset to his enterprise IT
department as a way to ensure that the software it implements and supports can best
meet his organization’s needs.
However, creating an agile enterprise requires more than implementing agile
methodologies within the IT department, CIOs and management experts say.
Experienced leaders say the most successful agile environments are ones where the
business side of the enterprise has embraced agile principles as well. And the best way
to do that, they say, is for the CIO to lead the way.
Getting the business on board
Toner started agile three years ago when he became CIO for the state, moving the IT
team from using the waterfall approach to an even split of agile and waterfall today. He
consolidated IT infrastructure to better enable agile approaches. He brought in workers
skilled in agile-oriented programming languages such .NET and Java who taught others
in the 400-staff IT department the languages and agile principles.

2. He also included that contractual language specifying how other departments also need
to engage in agile principles to ensure success. “We start out every engagement where
we’re going to use agile by talking about the need for the business to be engaged in the
process. And I make the director of each agency sign this contract and commit to this
way of development,” he says.
And Toner delivered early wins to show how IT, using agile, produced better results.
“To get the business on board with agile, I had to prove it to them. It was very much a
‘Show me’ [mentality],” he says. “But after a year or so of doing projects, word got
around that we’re delivering a product in a few weeks vs. months. Now agile is starting
to organically grow.”
Challenges to cultivating an agile culture
There are good reasons why CIOs need to cultivate agile across the enterprise, and not
just within IT.
Bringing the business units along the agile journey ensures IT has better visibility into
business needs and, thus, better alignment with business goals. It ensures that the
whole organization is getting better value out of its IT investments. And it helps better
position the enterprise to leverage technology for transformation, says Dave West, CEO
and product owner at Scrum.org. West talks about agile meaning the ability to quickly
deliver changes to the market.
But getting the business to embrace agile is challenging.
First, “agile” as a term is tricky. CIOs and the IT team understand it as a methodology,
while the business likely understands it in the traditional dictionary definition as having
the ability to move fast.
As such, CIOs need to help other executives understand agile as an approach to
delivering applications that requires business units and IT to partner in new ways. CIOs
need to enable this new partnership by selling their colleagues on it. And they must do
so without getting into the weeds by reciting the Agile Manifesto or spouting technical
jargon.
Meanwhile, CIOs and IT departments are still struggling with agile principles
themselves, and most are still working to more fully implement agile practices and
supporting technologies within IT itself. West estimates that a majority — 70 to 80
percent — of enterprise IT departments are using agile principles to some degree for
some of their software projects but many are held back by legacy technology, an
organizational culture that still sees IT as a cost center providing only commodity
service, and other factors.
That makes it very hard for IT to become agile, and when they to try to work in an agile
fashion, they may encounter resistance from the business side, West adds.

3. “For example, if you’re working on a two-week sprint and you want business to be
available to make decisions rapidly, the business [will be] like, ‘Oh no, we have more
important things to do,’” West says.
At the same time, CIOs pushing for an agile enterprise must also challenge the
entrenched culture of siloed thinking, where each department is concerned about what’s
best for it rather than understanding how its needs fit in with overall organizational
priorities.
The benefits, and limits, of selling the business on
agile
Denis Goulet, who is bringing his experience with agile in commercial software
development to his position as the IT department commissioner and New Hampshire
state CIO, has run up against various obstacles as he builds an agile enterprise. (He
defines an agile enterprise as “one that is committed to incremental delivery and a
culture of mutual accountability.”)
He says some business leaders have been reluctant to take on the role of product
owner, and they’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of time required from IT during
development sprints.
“We’re asking questions and more questions, and that can get people irritated and
asking, ‘Is that really the best way to do this?’” he says. “People will perceive that you’re
asking more from them in the continuous delivery model. You’re not. You’re just
changing from upfront to throughout the process. But making that leap is one of the
hardest pieces.”
Goulet says he has been tackling such obstacles as he works to get the business to
embrace agile. He’s borrowing from the agile playbook in this quest, going for
incremental and sustainable changes. He has created business-IT teams that address
issues together. He has increased the level of empowerment on teams as well as
accountability, letting team members know that he expects them to identify and fix
problems earlier rather than later. And he has established incremental deliveries as the
norm. Then he highlights those changes, and the successes they bring.
“I do a lot of evangelizing,” he says. “I don’t say we’re all going to do agile and we’ll all
be happy. I do not lead with agile terminology. I usually say, ‘We’re going to do this and
this and this and it will be less risky and less costly and it will give the user earlier
access to the benefits.’”
Others agree that CIOs need to take that approach — implementing agile
methodologies and delivering wins and then sharing those success stories with their C-
suite colleagues to win them over to this new way of working.

4. “This requires a CIO who is more of a salesman, an entrepreneur, someone who can
pitch a new way of thinking. You should talk about value and outcomes and business
challenges in straightforward business language and steer as much as possible away
from methodologies and technologies,” says Ralph Loura, a former CIO and CTO who
now works as a technology advisor to mature companies and startups.
He adds: “What I see work most often is not making an impassioned plea across the
organization to start a massive agile initiative. That’s too abstract to get their arms
around. Rather [successful CIOs] train five or six people, then pick a couple of small
projects and get them done in a really good way. Then you can build enough
momentum and you can bring along the whole organization.”
He says the goal is to develop an enterprise that embraces agile principles (even if
they’re not using the terminology) to become an organization that doesn’t talk about old
systems or IT project backlogs but instead says, “We have a set of choices to address
in an ongoing basis based on priorities.”
The IT-business balancing act
But Isaac Sacolick, president and CIO of StarCIO, a consulting and services business,
and author of Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through
Technology, cautions against pushing too much of agile on the enterprise.
Yes, he says, CIOs need the business to understand the value proposition that agile
principles bring and CIOs need business leaders to become product owners.
As such, CIOs do indeed have to bring along their fellow executives on the journey so
that they can help identify staffers with the right thinking and temperament to take on
the product owner responsibilities. And CIOs have to engage business leaders to
ensure that they can work in ways that support agile development.
“Some of the cultural things you figure out when delivering with agile is how to prioritize
and what is a minimally viable product. That takes a strong collaboration between
someone who understands the value proposition best (that’s the product owner) and the
technology team,” he says. “But a lot of what agile calls for falls into the camp of what IT
managers, developers, testers, Scrum masters running teams do. It’s very classic IT
execution.”
Toner understands that balancing act.
He says he doesn’t get into long explanations about agile ideas but rather tries to sell
business colleagues on the value that they gain by working differently. He frames it as a
choice between the traditional approach with less involvement and longer wait times or
a new type of partnership where they’d have new features rolled out in weeks, pay less
but participate more.

5. It’s an approach that has brought even reluctant business leaders around. Toner cites
the case of that unit head who just handed off requirements. Toner approached him
post-project delivery to ask whether he thought being involved earlier and more often
would have helped IT identify more needed features and functions. The response was
yes.
That recognition, Toner says, is what he’s using to promote agile within the enterprise.
As he explains: “The message I’m trying to send is: Do it right the first time by having
more skin in the game.”