Agile programs

It is a collection of stable and persistent Agile teams that coordinate, plan and manage their work on the same delivery cadence. This allows the teams on the trains to work toward a common goal more easily. And it allows leadership to more easily organize and understand how strategic commitments are broken up and worked across many teams at one time. If the project gets blocked due to changing requirements, progress stalls until a resolution is reached.

This approach does not plan for change, and thus, change is viewed as an inherently negative force. Teams take an iterative approach to development with regular feedback intervals, welcoming any changes that will increase the value they deliver. Developing in iterations means that teams can adapt quickly, keep progress moving forward as conditions change, and incorporate customer feedback in real time as requirements evolve. In Agile Program Management, teams are able to realize the benefits of collaborating with other teams, because they rely on each other to achieve the shared goal of maximizing customer value.

Agile teams operate as an integrated, evolving system where all stakeholders are actively involved in both development and delivery. Agile Program Management fundamentally changes how success, or value, is measured. In traditional project management, value is defined as efficiency and reliability: Being able to quickly and predictably deliver the thing we said we would deliver.

Delivering that value efficiently and reliably is important, but not as important as delivering the right value. In other words, Agile organizations work to improve their responsiveness, as a way to become more efficient and reliable to their customers. In Agile Program Management, product managers serve as an important intermediary between customers, internal stakeholders, and development teams.

The primary objective of the product manager is to set and adapt the product roadmap: An outline of how a product or solution will develop over time. Product managers are tasked with keeping the product roadmap focused on current market conditions and long-term goals: deciding what to build when, and how to sequence the development of various features to optimize development capacity and best meet customer demands.

To do their role well, much of product management involves asking thoughtful questions, synthesizing information, and communicating to ensure alignment between these various groups. They are the technical leadership of the ART, working to ensure that the system or solution that is being developed is fit for its intended purpose and developed with respect to the broader technology and architectural capabilities of the system.

They work with Agile teams to:. In organizations not using the SAFe approach to scaling Agile, the person in this role is likely called a Program Manager. Business owners are the people responsible for the value delivery and return on investment of the Agile Release Train. Typically, they are responsible for the entity that the ART roles into, the value stream.

In Agile Program Management, business owners ensure that the ART s are delivering value that aligns to established strategic objectives and desired outcomes. Since then, other authors, like Karl Weick , have generated more advanced concepts like sensemaking and enactment. This approach consists of setting up a decision management system whereby key stakeholders take the time to discuss issues, to agree a shared strategic vision and to make series of small decisions on an ongoing basis in alignment with this vision.

This is basically the concept of iterative development, which forms the basis of agile methods and is relevant for defined agile projects and programs that have a low level of ambiguity. In agile project and programs reliability of estimates is refined in the first few iterations or cycles; this is what Larman has called adaptive planning in contrast to predictive planning. As the situation evolves, results are evaluated and new decisions are made that continually reinforce or realign the vision according to reality, this aspect corresponds to the evolutionary and adaptive development concept as is the case for complex programs and new product development.

This concept forms the basis of the Decision Management system displayed in Exhibit 3. The first feature of this system is that it is cyclical, driven by a continual feedback loop based on actual results. The learning cycle consists of understanding stakeholder expectations, prioritising them and developing viable options to enable choice.

The performance cycle consists of delivering products, capabilities and, ultimately, benefits to the organisation. Based on the analysis of these results, expectations are adjusted to reflect a new situation or re-align the strategy to new developments. Adaptive methods imply that the team will adapt components of the solution in response to feedback on early results.

The combination of evolutionary and adaptive is also known as iterative development. One of the key aspects of good iterative development is user involvement; one of the key aspects of good program management is stakeholder engagement. Without the involvement of decision-makers during the process, lots of time and effort will be lost redesigning solutions that are not satisfactory.

A generally accepted definition of stakeholders is: individuals or groups that can be positively or negatively affected by the program process or its outcomes and have the potential to influence them.

Program level stakeholder management is not just about managing pre-set processes, but about influencing people and building rewarding relationships.

In the project management world, needs and expectations are considered two separate issues. Most project management books and manuals define a need as an explicit requirement, whereas typically, expectations are undefined requirements. Agile management, like program management, cannot afford to consider only existing and declared needs, but must also strive to uncover undeclared and potential needs, usually labelled as expectations.

Agile management builds on this concept by involving customer in the whole process of decision-making to ensure that, not only needs, but also expectations are met.

Only a sound stakeholder management process will enable the identification and realisation of significant benefits; those that matter. Agile teams are built on the principles of self-organization and self-management; this goes against the traditional project culture of most organisations and requires a culture change.

But it enables team to be much more creative and flexible. In complex situations, traditional project managers should think in terms of fast tracking, where planning and execution are conducted in parallel and where the plan continually evolves, based on rapid results delivery. Fast-tracking only works when decision-makers are continually involved from the start. I have experienced first-hand the necessity of involving stakeholders on an ongoing basis in large construction fast-track projects to be successful.

When the environment is turbulent and delivery needs to be fast only an ongoing decision process based on value realisation can work. Exhibit 4 shows how a typical stakeholder value chain creates a flow of learning and performance that enables ongoing delivery of benefits and re-evaluation of requirements and expectation, based on the analysis of results. In this program-based diagram, customers define their needs, which are translated by the program team into a clear scope for the projects that are part of the program.

Partnerships are created with suppliers to deliver project components and work packages. The project and program team deliver products and services incrementally and capabilities are implemented into the business.

Based on the performance of those new capabilities, adjustments are made to the requirements and so on…Agile management applies similar concepts:. Its format contains three questions. Participants state what they did yesterday, what they will to today and what road blocker stands in their way. Collaboration between all the actors in the process is essential to ensure that the program and its component projects will deliver the strategic objectives.

In programs, if the strategic objective and expected benefits have not been defined accurately and prioritised the result will not deliver value. In a turbulent environment, agile management, through its user involvement, ensures that an ongoing stream of working deliverables are produced and well integrated into a whole. All organizations aim to make a profit, or to increase their revenues, so they want to invest as little as possible to reap the highest possible benefits. I outlined, in the previous sections, the importance of identifying and classifying benefits in accordance to their significance for the business.

This can only happen if there is a sound governance system in place. Governance is one of the most misused terms in business, governance is currently associated with disaster prevention, risk mitigation and consequently, tighter controls. Legal issues of corporate responsibility are the main driver for the systems put in place to support this narrow vision of governance. These systems are stifling innovation and creating an oppressing culture in organizations where everybody feels that they should protect themselves rather than contribute to value creation.

In a well-integrated governance context, programs would sustain a value creation perspective, supported by innovativeness and empowerment; they would focus on maximizing opportunities rather than reducing threats. Program sponsors would also seek a wider set of success criteria, a drive towards sustainability over short-term results and, overall, an increased focus on the link between expected benefits and results.

Most current organisational structures and projects are based on tight controls; this approach complicates the management system and removes a lot of the innovativeness and flexibility within the organisation; it favours prevention over empowerment.

Empowerment is fostered by simple management systems, whereas bureaucracy stifles it. Many governance related tasks, like requiring sign-off on a full requirements document before development can start, interfere with the agility of the solutions.

This system does not prevent frequent measurement; on the contrary, it encourages regular measurement of results based on the realisation of expected benefits. But measurement is made at significant gateways and based on results rather than on a pre-set schedule and mere respect of the baseline.

Programs are in essence complex. According to Mintzberg , in cases of high complexity and low rate of change, which is typical of large scale governmental or infrastructure programs, decisions are made in cooperation, so as to tap into the collective expertise of the team and to make sure all the available data has been considered.

Because the rate of change is not fast, there is time to formulate the decision and traditional decision tools can be used in an analytical approach. People could go online and sign it to show their support.

Agile Alliance was officially formed in late as a place for people who are developing software and helping others develop software to explore and share ideas and experiences.

Teams and organizations started to adopt Agile, led primarily by people doing the development work in the teams. Gradually, managers of those teams also started introducing Agile approaches in their organizations.

As Agile became more widely known, an ecosystem formed that included the people who were doing Agile software development and the people and organizations who helped them through consulting, training, frameworks, and tools.

As the ecosystem began to grow and Agile ideas began to spread, some adopters lost sight of the values and principles espoused in the manifesto and corresponding principles.

Organizations that focus solely on the practices and the rituals experience difficulties working in an Agile fashion. Instead, it simply becomes the way they approach work. Agile Alliance continues to curate resources to help you adopt Agile practices and improve your ability to develop software with agility.

The Agile Alliance website provides access to those resources including videos and presentations from our conferences , experience reports , an Agile Glossary , a directory of local community groups , and several other resources. Those values and principles provide guidance on how to create and respond to change and how to deal with uncertainty. When you face uncertainty, try something you think might work, get feedback, and adjust accordingly.

Keep the values and principles in mind when you do this. Let your context guide which frameworks, practices, and techniques you use to collaborate with your team and deliver value to your customers. If Agile is a mindset, then what does that say about the idea of Agile methodologies?

To answer this question, you may find it helpful to have a clear definition of methodology. Alistair Cockburn suggested that a methodology is the set of conventions that a team agrees to follow. So Agile methodologies are the conventions that a team chooses to follow in a way that follows Agile values and principles. The team will always need to adapt its use of a framework to fit properly in its context.

The Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles were written by a group of software developers and a tester to address issues that software developers faced. When you think of Agile as a mindset, that mindset can be applied to other activities. When you do that, Agile becomes an adjective. It describes how you perform some activity. It does not create a new methodology for the reasons explained above.

You might say that business agility is a recognition that in order for people in an organization to operate with an Agile mindset, the entire organization needs to support that mindset. Agile software development was never truly Agile until the organization changed its structure and operations to work in an uncertain environment. Below are a few key Agile concepts. You can see more in our glossary section. A small minority of team members may be part-time contributors, or may have competing responsibilities.

Incremental Development : Nearly all Agile teams favor an incremental development strategy; in an Agile context, this means that each successive version of the product is usable, and each builds upon the previous version by adding user-visible functionality. Discover the many benefits of becoming a member of the leading organization promoting the concepts of Agile Development.

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