The document is a fictional acceptance speech given in 2020 by the CIO of a large multinational conglomerate accepting an award for best CIO of the year. In the speech, the CIO describes how over 20 years they gradually transitioned the company's IT divisions from traditional waterfall approaches to agile development by starting with small pilots and proving success over time. This included adopting practices like frequent iterative releases, open source tools, value stream mapping, and prioritizing business needs over IT efficiency. As a result of these changes, agile has now become the default practice for software development across most organizations.

1. Context: Agile Journal editor Russell Pannone asked us to write an article on the agile and lean software development
movement 10 years from now. Tiffany and I took a novel approach of what we believe agile and lean development will look like
in 2020.We started thinking as a future CIO and why it will make sense for me to adopt and grow agile. Result of that effort is
an article which is in the form of an acceptance speech - best CIO of 2020 award acceptance speech. It’s in first person so
hopefully reading will be enjoyable. The article was published on Agile Journal, May 2010 edition
(http://bit.ly/AcceptanceSpeec).
2020 Best CIO Acceptance Speech
by Anupam Kundu & Tiffany Lentz
For people who do not know me, it must be difficult to comprehend how I became the CIO of
this mega multinational conglomerate. It has been an uphill task to move from the server
rooms to this boardroom; believe me that technology skills alone were not good enough to
make this gradual but sure leap. Looking back, I give credit to a heady concoction of Portfolio
Management experience, stead fast communication, and adoption of Agile principles and
practices across all the IT divisions that made this happen. And also a lot of good old luck.
When I joined this organization as the VP of Engineering, 20 years back, Agile was still in its
teens. Many of my fellow managers had heard of rapid release capabilities, but had never seen
a company really do it. I knew from my experience in media start-ups that Agile would be
mainstream in a few short years; it was just a matter of time. And there are obvious benefits in
doing iterative development to incrementally build software products. Besides, Agile with its
‘inspect and adapt’ philosophy chimed well with the PDCA (plan-do-check-act) paradigm of lean
operations. However it was hard for me to sell this apparently obvious concept of evolutionary
software product development to the bosses.
The idea of “iterating” over a concept was something that only startups were doing. Those
ideas somehow did not seem ‘stable’ for an organization as large as ours. In addition, we were
tied to licensing large technology stacks and rigorous deployment checklist gates, making it
difficult to accommodate frequent releases; we were limited to only two enterprise wide
releases in a year keeping in mind the cost of integrating with the legacy systems for each such
release. While my bosses understood the proposed benefits of evolutionary software product
development, they were not ready or prepared to revolutionize our IT divisions. So I was up
against massive organizational dissent when I started advocating change: adoption of Agile’s
evolutionary concepts and using open source platforms and tools for product development.
Change is always an alien, still you see it happen! Since I believed so strongly in this vision of
evolutionary software product development, I wanted to prove it to those who could fund my
vision and allow me to effect change. I started small, with one project in my department. I was
able to illustrate moderate success with the pilot; the business sponsor for the project was
impressed with the cost control and the discipline involved in building the product iteratively. I
got the go-ahead to introduce the change virus in my department, one project at a time. This
took me a couple of years, but at the end of the second year I was asked to run another division
and made the same changes. These divisions were releasing so frequently and their business

2. counterparts were so involved that other divisions started referring to us as the “Business
Technology” group within the next few years. Finally, I tackled the data warehousing and
mainframe divisions. A Value Stream Mapping exercise pointed out the areas needing the most
attention and we started the multi-year effort of reworking our mainframe.
Back in 2010, the Gartner group wrote an article that strongly impacted the way I thought
about team dynamics. I was not the CIO, but thinking like one helped me further transform my
teams. This article, “Leading in Times of Transition: The 2010 CIO Agenda”, called out a few key
differentiators that CIOs (and managers like myself) should consider as we were moving from a
time of recession to recovery. By focusing on the business, not on the needs of IT as a separate
entity and by iterating through business solutions, we were positioning our teams and our
company to move forward faster than our peers. Over the years, our mindset changed. We
began to not just SAY that the needs of our business was the heartbeat of our company, but we
began to align our technology solutions around the needs of our business so our actions
matched our words. We, IT, began to really value the aspects that businesses value: output,
productivity over efficiency, priority driven schedules, demand driving supply, ROI, etc.
Gradually, one success at a time, I found strong support from the upper echelons of business
that didn’t well-understand agile but were seeing the output and hearing the excitement from
their own peers. These business leaders comprehended the obvious cost benefits of the
following concepts that became foundational for our company:
• using open source software to develop and deploy iteratively
• doing more frequent discovery-delivery-discovery cycles to keep in touch with the
market
• waiting till the last responsible moment to commit to key decisions
• adopt metrics to foster collaborative team dynamics rather than focusing on individual
brilliance
Now, 20 years later, Agile is truly mainstream. No development organization, internal or
external, speaks of also-doing-Agile or Agile-in-stealth-mode. Agile is the default software
development practice across most organizations. In the same way that no one specifically
speaks about “Object Oriented Development” or Cloud Computing as separate practices, Agile
today is not considered alien but an integral part of the software development teams. Over the
past 20 years, I’ve seen larger organizations who could not envision a roadmap of change
stagnate and often close their doors to their smaller, more “Agile” competitors, so I believe that
there are invaluable lessons to be learned here.

3. About the Authors
Tiffany Lentz is proudly employed as a Principal Consultant and Program Manager with ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm
focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering
solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and transformation efforts to incorporate and
enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and
practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the
Iteration Manager’s job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.
Anupam Kundu is currently employed as a Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks North America. Anupam has more than 12
years of experience in various stages of software development life-cycle and post-implementation activities as a programmer,
business analyst, project/program manager and change management consultant. Anupam comes from a broad consulting
background and offers specific experience for managing large scale software projects/programs and change management
initiatives across multiple business domains. In his current role, Anupam is primarily focused on enabling multiple globally
distributed software delivery teams through active adoption of agile/lean principles and practices.
Anupam has recently contributed to books and articles on agile and is a speaker on agile/lean principles and practices especially
that affect the product owners.