Can Agile Governance Add Value?
- With processes that work for your world
- With rapid decision-making at minimal cost
- Reduce the time, effort of making decisions
- Make them more frequently
- Think Lean Start-Up: Less time spent making plans, quicker test of your hypotheses
- Have more opportunities to experiment, learn, change direction
- With high visibility for priorities, status of work
Why Do We Need Agile Governance?
- Things that take too long
- Time-to-market: 18 months instead of eight weeks
- Integration test cycles: too many, too many months
- Things that often fail
- Coordination across Business Units
- Dependencies
- Handoffs
- Confusion
- Lack of clarity around authority to make decisions
- “Too many cooks in the kitchen”
- Lack of understanding about what can be meaningfully estimated
- Inadequate determination of ROI to support portfolio decisions
Where To Begin
- Imagine a large company that produces technology products
- The most important question to answer about the continuing development of these products is not
- What features to build
- What technologies to use
- What infrastructure to develop
- How to manage development
- The most important question is
- How do we decide what to do?
- … because this covers everything else
It is About Decision Making …
- Is often mentioned, but seldom defined
- Is commonly seen as being about control
- Is really about decisions that lead to actions
- Our definition:
- “Governance is the formalization and exercise of repeatable decision-making practices
- In other words, Governance is how to decide what to do
Decision Making Detail
- Agile Governance is an Agile style of decision making
- Enables rapid decisions, based on lightweight artifacts developed with minimum effort
- Is applicable to any process (Agile, Plan-Driven, Hybrid, etc.)
- Agile Governance reflects the values of the Agile Manifesto
- Emphasizes interaction, collaboration, results, adaptation to change
- Over: Processes, tools, internal documents, contracts, plans
- Agile Governance is adaptable, not rigidly prescriptive
