If you are a technology driven organization in existence for a decade or more, it is quite natural that you may have a mix of old and new IT applications. It becomes even more interesting when you have a bunch of in-house developed and vendor applications.
The third dimension to this
blend, given the nature of operations is the fact that you have a combination
of legacy applications that are running with minimum required support and new
ones that are part delivered or the stars in the horizon for which development
is in progress.
Frame the above picture in
your mind and now think what will be your consideration when you are moving
from the Waterfall way of delivery to Agile delivery. Before heading to the
answer, we first need to look at some of the Agile considerations assuming we
all are familiar with Waterfall.
With the risk of sounding like
an Agile Coach, here are a few quick thoughts that come to my mind the moment
we speak Agile. Sizeable chunks of work,
Fail fast and Iterative development.
Sizeable
chunks of work
This is probably one of the
first questions that we need to ask the teams. Does the current status of a product
allow us to break it down into sizeable chunks so that Agile development can
logically apply? This could be possible for products that are already in
production and for which a healthy enhancement pipeline exists. On the other
hand you could face challenges with those products for which development is
half way through with a pre-agreed delivery methodology. The scenario gets
complex if we have a vendor in the mix.
Fail
Fast
It is true that you could
apply this fantastic concept for your products. This equally must apply for
your transformation saga as well. You may try to pull off an Agile
transformation for your identified products, but if any of them does not meet a
criteria, it’ll be better to rethink the strategy. Probably having an Agile KPI
is a good idea so that you have a measurable action based on which informed
decisions can be made.
Iterative
Development
This is a fundamental
building block of Agile. Can you create your product in iterations? Can the
releases be planned to add value to business incrementally? Can the product be
pieced together to finally form a jigsaw? Are the stakeholders all aligned to
meet this criteria? If the answer to any of these is ‘No’ you’ll need to revisit
your transformation path for that product.
There are definitely many
more factors that drive Agile transformation. The above three are probably some
of the key ones. What is important is to remember the fact that while
transformation could be essential for progress, it isn’t the panacea for an
organization where a plethora of technology flavours co-exist.
You need to choose and choose
wisely. Else your Agile transformation will end up being nothing but fragile!
