Title: Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery
Author: Sriram Narayan
Year: 2015
Pages: 304
Agile IT Organization Design by Sriram Narayan is a comprehensive guide for managers and executives who want to improve the quality and speed of their software development processes.
To gain the full benefits of agility in any software organization, you need to extend the organization as a whole, not just for some development teams, in a book that states the applicability of Agile principles in designing an Agile IT organization followed by the explanation of the macro-level view of the structure of organizations.
The book provides a comprehensive guide to designing an agile IT organization that can adapt to changing business needs and deliver value to customers.
As a result, I gave this book a rating of 8.0/10.
For me, a book with a note 10 is one I consider reading again every year. Among the books I rank with 10, for example, is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
3 Reasons to Read Agile IT Organization Design
Adopting Agile Principles
Narayan provides a roadmap for implementing agile methodologies, enabling swift adaptation to changing market dynamics.
Empowering Teams
Narayan advocates for a shift towards decentralized decision-making, empowering teams to take ownership of their work and drive meaningful change within the organization.
Narayan adeptly navigates the complexities of modern IT organizations, offering clarity amidst chaos. Readers gain invaluable insights into managing intricate systems and processes with agility and efficiency.
Book Overview
The author explains the centralized and decentralized structures with their pros and cons.
He then goes on to provide thorough coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organizational norms, communication, and culture.
Agile IT Organization Design provides a basis for reviewing and reshaping the IT organization to equip it better for the digital age, discussing how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams, and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT, learning how to eliminate the specific organizational silos that cause the most problems
The author’s extensive experience and deep understanding of agile principles shine through in the way he presents the material.
The book is divided into several sections, each focusing on a critical aspect of agile IT organization design.
Agile IT Organization Design demonstrates how to integrate agility with sales, marketing, product development, engineering, and operations, helping each function deliver more value individually and link it with the rest of the business as well as evaluate and improve organization designs to enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Addressing people, process, and technology, Agile IT Organization Design guides you in improving both the dynamic and static aspects of organization design, addressing team structure, accountability structures, organizational norms and culture, metrics, and more.
The real-world relevance of the book is further enhanced by the author’s inclusion of practical advice and actionable insights. Narayan doesn’t just present theoretical concepts; he provides clear guidance on how to apply them in real-world situations.
This makes the book an invaluable resource for organizations that are looking to embark on their agile journey, as it offers a roadmap for success that is grounded in practicality and real-world experience.
Teams must have high autonomy over what they work on, not just how they implement it.
But if teams are all super autonomous, they will all go off in different directions. Sriram terms this runaway autonomy, and it’s a genuine concern.
So is the answer more management and control?
Actually, the answer is to align teams with business outcomes.
If the goal of a team is to improve a business outcome, then it will be oriented toward system-level benefits, by creating truly cross-functional teams, carefully analysing business outcomes, and appointing outcome owners.
Agile IT Organization Design provides a basis for reviewing and reshaping the IT organization to equip it better for the digital age, discussing how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams, and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT.
What are the Key Ideas
Agile Transformation Framework
Narayan introduces a comprehensive framework for driving agile transformation within IT organizations. By addressing key areas such as structure, processes, culture, and leadership, businesses can orchestrate a holistic transformation journey.
Lean Principles in Practice
Drawing inspiration from lean principles, it explores strategies for eliminating waste and maximizing efficiency across IT operations. From streamlining workflows to optimizing resource allocation, businesses can achieve agility and responsiveness.
Scalable Architecture Design
Scalability is a cornerstone of agile IT organization design. Narayan delves into the intricacies of designing scalable architectures that can adapt to evolving business needs and accommodate future growth seamlessly.
Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Building upon the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), it outlines a blueprint for establishing a robust delivery pipeline. By automating key stages of the software delivery process, organizations can achieve speed, reliability, and consistency in product releases.
What are the Main Lessons
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Foster collaboration between IT teams and business stakeholders to ensure alignment with organizational goals and priorities.
Continuous Learning
Cultivate a learning mindset within the organization, encouraging employees to seek out new knowledge and skills to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Customer-Centricity
Prioritize the needs and preferences of customers, leveraging feedback to drive product development and service delivery initiatives.
My Book Highlights & Quotes
Digital transformation is a lot more dependent on Agile transformation than is apparent from high altitudes.
Simply doing sprints or iterations doesn’t make it iterative development if feedback is not sought in between or is ignored in deference to a release plan.
Handoffs are mostly a result of specialization. Organization design cannot reduce these handoffs, but it can make them faster and cheaper by making them occur inside a single team.
Tools that blur boundaries between specialists are better than those that reinforce them.
Expensive handoffs encourage large batch sizes to reduce the total number of handoffs.
Lean product discovery techniques (for start-ups and enterprises) help with the first mile. Continuous delivery and DevOps help with the last mile. Agile software development has become mainstream for the miles in between.
How do we go about reinforcement? Here is one way to do it for some organizational norms: Create an internal blog for each norm. Explain the value of the norm in an introductory post from leadership. Use subsequent posts to narrate supporting stories. Employees subscribe to the blog, vote up or like stories, and comment on posts.
Recognize that a permission culture is a risk-averse culture. Embrace (perhaps tacitly) the norm of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It encourages people to take initiative without being too fearful of breaking rules.
In enterprise IT, a capability team owns all systems relevant to the capability. They may be systems of record, differentiation, or innovation. In the spirit of DevOps, they are built and run by the capability team.
Systems of record (e.g., payroll and HR) are like utilities (electricity, water, etc.). Although they are essential, they need to be cost-efficient. Systems of differentiation (e.g., a commercial SaaS offering) provide competitive advantage. Systems of innovation are built to try new ideas and graduate the ones that perform well to systems of differentiation.
Product lines (or LOBs) need to be individually successful. This is success of the first order. Exploiting cross-product synergies, offering bundles, and achieving cross-product standardization for marketing are examples of higher-order success. Do not organize for higher-order success before first-order success is achieved. Doing so puts the cart before the horse.
Cross-functional teams fold the entire software delivery value stream into a single team, rather than let it span across multiple activity-oriented teams. This reduces the cost of handoffs, allows reduction in batch size, and thereby decreases cycle time (improving responsiveness).
To bridge the divide between planning and execution, overlap them. It is possible to design an organization where planners are required to spend, say, 20% of their time in execution.
The adaptability of a process correlates inversely with the length of its feedback loops. In order to fail-fast (and learn quickly) rather than slowly, we need short feedback loops.
Whole value stream optimization is far more important than optimizing activities that constitute the stream.
In conclusion, Agile IT Organization Design by Sriram Narayan is a must-read for any manager or executive looking to improve their software development and delivery processes.
Sriram Narayan’s book Agile IT Organization Design is not the only book on agile IT organization design.
However, it is one of the most comprehensive and practical resources available.
Here are a few other books that focus on agile IT organization design:
Not only does Agile IT Organization Design provide insightful advice and strategies to help organizations transition to a product-centric model, but it also offers practical tips and guidance to help create an agile organization and foster continuous delivery.
With its actionable advice and case studies, Agile IT Organization Design will undoubtedly leave readers with the tools they need to redesign their organizations for success.
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