Doing Agile Right

Agile enterprises map the work that needs to be done to meet customer needs and deploy dedicated cross-functional agile teams to change the business.

Talent system: Agile enterprises use performance-driven processes for determining how to acquire, deploy, assess, develop, reward, and inspire talent, and continuously improve the systems and approaches to people management.

one more ingredient of fun: teaching and coaching others. Teaching—and watching others learn—is one of the most rewarding and satisfying of human endeavors.

One tactic for making the whole endeavor fun is to create and celebrate frequent wins.

A critical tool for the team is a robust, adaptive backlog of opportunities that team members can tackle together. The backlog will give your team a realistic, itemized, fact-based vision of how much value is possible, and in what order the team should attack the work.

first step should be to create an agile leadership team, which will operate just like any other agile team.

Agile enterprises create balanced systems that efficiently adapt to changing customer opportunities in order to deliver superior results.

In an agile enterprise, executives do not focus on optimizing the performance of individual teams. They focus instead on improving the performance of the entire business system.

In 2004, a decade after the company’s founding, Amazon also changed its approach to funding innovative initiatives and running proposal discussions. Today, every plan and every proposal—especially those for two-pizza teams—begins with a six-page memo. The memo opens with a visionary one- or two-page press release of the benefits the initiative would create for customers. Very much like the user stories in any agile backlog, mock press releases describe targeted customers, the benefits they are seeking, the frustrations they have experienced with previous solutions, and the advantages of the new Amazon approach.

Amazon tracks some five hundred metrics, and nearly 80 percent of them relate to customers.