Realising agility in technology change

Agile software delivery is something I’ve been involved with for two decades now - since the early days of XP, Scrum and the Agile manifesto. Those of you who have worked with me or heard me talk on the subject will know that I often refer to the mixed economy of agile software delivery in a non-agile world. This boundary between the flexibility of an agile delivery and some physical world constraints is usually the cause of many challenges when implementing change.

Back in the early 2000s you met the non-agile boundary pretty quickly. Many of you will remember working on programmes where application software was created using agile techniques but there was a huge waterfall plan for configuring the physical tin and wires in a data centre. To a large extent this often got in the way of true agile delivery and the incremental realisation of value.

In recent years there have been huge advances in how and where our application code gets executed. In the Cloud we have transitioned through virtualisation, containers and into Serverless computing. The physical world of custom built data centres for enterprise applications dissolved into infrastructure as code delivered alongside the application software using agile techniques. The frontier of the physical world was rolled back and agility in delivering change increased as a result.

The shift in thinking from discrete change projects to continuous product delivery and the evolution of the IT organisation to incorporate DevOps means that we can now be truly agile in technology delivery.

It may be a key enabler, but there is much more to business agility than technology.

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