Strategy-Focused Agile Transformation: A Case Study
Strategic agility enables an organisation to sense and seize opportunities, manage uncertainty and adapt to changes. This paper presents one case study of a traditional charitable organisation taking a strategy-focused approach to agile transformation. Interview data was collected over a 13-month period through interviews at different stages and with different members of the transformation team and Heads of Department. This case study illustrates the challenges faced in such a transformation, and shows that strategic agility requires different time horizons to co-exist: a future vision, a medium term set of objectives and a short term performance monitoring perspective.
Enterprise Agility: A Balancing Act – A Local Government Case Study
Austerity and financial constraints have been threatening the public sector in the UK for a number of years. Foreseeing the threat of continued budget cuts, and addressing the situation many local councils face, requires
internal transformations for financial stability without losing the key focus on public service. Agile transformations have been undertaken by organisations wanting to learn from the software development community and bringing agile principles into the wider organisation. This paper describes and analyses an ongoing behaviour-led transformation in a district council in the UK. It presents the results of the analysis of 19 interviews with internal stakeholders at the council, of observations of meetings among senior and middle management in a five-month period. The paper explores the successes and the challenges encountered towards the end of the transformation process and reflects on balancing acts to address the challenges, between: disruption and business as usual, empowerment and goal setting, autonomy and processes and procedures, and behaviours and skills. Based on our findings, we suggest that behaviours on their own cannot guarantee a sustained agile culture, and that this is equally important for enterprise agility and for large-scale agile software development transformations.
Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?
Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation.
https://oro.open.ac.uk/55138/1/10.1007%252F978-3-319-91602-6_9.pdf
Sustaining Agile Beyond Adoption
Agile approaches are adopted in industry to improve outcomes from software development, and are
increasingly the subject of research studies. However, adoption is not the end of the story. Agile requires on-going change and commitment in order to become sustainable and embedded within teams and organisations. This study explores current perceptions of post-adoptive agility. We asked 50 practitioners ‘what does agile sustainability mean to you?’. Analysis of practitioner comments identified four themes: being completely agile, independent, focused on business value and need, and consistent across time. Post-adoptive agile is an under-researched area, there is inconsistent use of terminology, and there is a gap between practitioners’ and researchers’ perceptions about what
is important for sustaining agile.
https://oro.open.ac.uk/58207/1/SPPI_shortened_submitted%20copy.pdf
A COMPARISON OF MOOC DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY APPROACHES
We present a comparison of two ways of developing and delivering MOOCs. One was developed by the Open University in collaboration with FutureLearn; the other was developed independently by a small team at Northampton University. The different approaches had very different profiles of pedagogic flexibility, cost, development processes, institutional support, and participant numbers. This comparison shows that, even several years after MOOCs came to prominence, there is a range of viable approaches for MOOCs. MOOCs on existing large platforms can reach many thousands of people, but constrain pedagogical choice. Smaller, self-made MOOCs have smaller audiences but can target them more effectively.
The Challenges That Challenge: Engaging With Agile Practitioners’ Concerns
Context: There continues to be concern that research is not addressing the challenges that practice faces. For the benefit of academia and industry, researchers need to be aware of practitioners’ challenges and their context so that relevant and applicable research is undertaken.
Objective: This paper investigates two research questions: what challenges do agile practitioners face? and, how do practitioner challenges manifest themselves in an organisational setting? It aims to map the practitioner challenge landscape, explore challenge characteristics, compare findings with previous literature and identify implications for research that is relevant to practice.
Method: A combination of methods was used: elicitation of practitioner challenges collected using a Challenge Wall at a series of practitioner events; organisational Case Study using interviews, document analysis and observation; and online Survey. Findings were then compared to previous publications.
Results: Challenges collected from the Challenge Wall were grouped under 27 subthemes and seven themes: Claims and Limitations, Organisation, Sustainability, Culture, Teams, Scale, and Value. Investigating one challenge in the Case Study uncovered a set of new challenges, which were interrelated. Over 50% of survey respondents experienced challenges highlighted in the Case Study.
Conclusion: The landscape of agile practitioner challenges is complex and intertwined. Some challenges, such as doing agile in a non-agile environment, are multi-dimensional, affect many aspects of practice, and may be experienced simultaneously as business, organisational, social and adaptation problems. Some challenges, such as understanding cultural change or measuring agile value, persist and are hard to address, while others, such as adoption, change focus over time. Some challenges, such as governance and contracts, are under-researched, while others, such as business and IT transformation, have been researched but findings have not had the expected impact. Researchers wishing to address practitioner challenges need to treat them in context rather than in isolation and improve knowledge transfer.
https://oro.open.ac.uk/45729/2/The%20Challenges%20That%20Challenge%20-%20final.pdf