Insights from Agile Australia

Thank you for taking the time to complete our pin-board activity at Agile Australia recently. Your contribution has helped us to consolidate a view on how Australian organizations leverage innovation, technology and agility within their organizations to create value.

Even a cursory glance at the pin-board highlights a stark contrast between one question around a company's ability to ship code quickly and all the rest. Participants in general have reported that they had a moderate to high degree of confidence in their ability to introduce new ideas, to focus on customer needs, to create change, and to fail fast, each of which suggests that these organizations are fertile ground for agile methodologies. 

However, many participants indicated an inability to ship quality code quickly and reliably. This suggests that no matter how well-intentioned these organizations are, fundamental constraints still exist in delivery and execution.

As a business that helps companies across the globe with many of the questions posed on the pin-board, we aren't surprised by the results. Initiatives to make businesses more innovative and responsive tend to focus on process and organizational structure, and rightly so. 

Changes to how work flows through an organization, how funding is approved, and how business and IT teams can work closely together is what is needed today. However, these changes are limited by the quality of the technology that the organization is working with. Legacy systems that require manual testing and deployment quickly derail business-wide transformation. Working with clients at various stages of their digital transformation, we have consistently found that transformation efforts that neglect to run business and technology change concurrently quickly fall short of the mark.

Change that cuts across business and technology requires people that have specialization in each area to affect that change. To be truly transformative however, organizations require people that understand how business and technology can be aligned to deliver innovation quickly and sustainably. With this goal in mind, we suggest the following resources to help you along your journey:

• Value-driven digital business
  
• The quick and the dead: leadership in the age of digital complexity
  
• Microservices as an evolutionary architecture
  
• Pioneering organizational transformation: what you need to know