Integrating Agility

So "agile" is one of those popular buzzwords, you can add it to anything, and it makes it sound cool....

Agile Software Development.

Agile Project Management.

Agile Business.

It's one more sad case of lost meaning by over-use. But oh well, we live in an overzealous marketing culture.

So let's step a bit. Semantics, after all, is a key pillar of better Business Intelligence and the future Web.

Agile software development seems at quite a mature stage, so we'll exploit it as a model for the other layers. The principles are sound, the opportunity is in more organizations adopting agile development methodologies, and embracing iterative & incremental delivery.

Agile project management is evolving right in line with agile software development. If you think of agile development as the physical (because tangible) part, let's consider the project part as the logical aspect. Lots of good thought has become established and is applied to more and more projects as we speak.

Agile business is less formally defined, and more driven by creativity, competition and new opportunities.

So where's the catch then? As is my passion, in integration.

If we can agree for a moment that the number one challenge these days in suceeding with any endeavor is complexity, and furthermore, that complexity at a high level is comprised of

• Scale (the sheer size of an undertaking, the volume of elements involved)
• Dynamics (change, speed, reciprocal interactions)
• Context (relationships, structural, logical, semantic, social/behavioral)

then we have a good basis to address the challenges more concisely, without getting bogged down by academic details (I am a pragmatist, after all).

So where was I going with this.... right, integrating agility between the development, project and business levels.

So if I understand things right, agility manifests itself in practice as

• cyclic revisiting of multiple phases (iterations),
• with incremental value added to (often intermediate) results,
• based on high levels of interactivity & feedback between the stake holders (developers, project managers, the business)

So, on the business end, this would manifest itself to something (simplified) as A/B Testing in Marketing.

On the project side, this would correlate to timelines, deliverables, and resource load/distribution.

At the development level, this is guided by tangible artifacts, and progress toward completion as well as quality tracking (testing)

The challenge remains, how do you integrate theses seemingly not closely correlated layers? I know, methodologies like Scrum imply that everybody is involved in the same cycle. The reality is that every role (of the various stake holders) has a different perspective, and therefore implicitly different priorities, and potentially diverging (tactical) goals.

So how do we synchronize goals of the different roles & perspectives? Perhaps we should borrow a page from John Zachman? Also, David Hay has expressed some intriguing thoughts along those lines. In another article, we shall explore some of their concepts & ideas as they are applicable and re-usable to the B. I. space.

Why am I bringing all this up? Because it's part of Business Intelligence.

Not the numbers, but the results!