Worth Reading: The Agile Enterprise: Building and Running your Agile Enterprise - for better business results

Imagine an enterprise where everyone focuses on the highest customer value.  Where strategy to tasks are visible so everyone knows if their work is aligned with the highest value work. Imagine an enterprise where a discovery mindset wins over certainty thinking. Where experimentation with increments and feedback help define the way toward customer value.

Imagine a company where employees use 100% of their brain power to self organize around the work and be trusted to think of better ways to work. Where leaders encourage employees to put customer value first.  Imagine an enterprise where customers embrace the products and services being built because they are engaged in the building of the work all along the way.

If you can imagine it, it can be yours!  In this unique and cutting edge Agile book, veteran Enterprise Agile Coach Mario Moreira, will guide you to build and run an Agile enterprise at every level and at every point from idea to delivery. Learn how Agile-mature organizations adapt nimbly to micro changes in market conditions and customer needs and continuously deliver optimal value to customers.  Learn cutting-edge practices and concepts as you extend your implementation of Agile pervasively and harmoniously through the whole enterprise for greater customer value and business success.

Readers of The Agile Enterprise will learn how to:

• Establish a Customer Value Driven engine with an enterprise idea pipeline to process an enterprise’s portfolio of ideas more quickly and productively toward customer value and through all levels of the enterprise
• Incorporate the Discovery Mindset; experimental, incremental, design, and divergent thinking; and fast feedback loops to increase the odds that what you build aligns more closely to what customer wants.
• Leverage Lean Canvas, Personas, Story Mapping, Cost of Delay, Discovery Mindset, Servant leadership, Self-organization, and more to deliver optimum value to customers
• Use continuous Agile Budgeting and enterprise idea pipeline at the senior levels of the enterprise to enable you to adapt to the speed of the market.
• Reinvent Human Resources, Portfolio Management, Finance, and many areas of leadership toward new roles in the enablement of customer value. 
• Establish a holistic view of the state of your Agile Galaxy from top-to-bottom and end-to-end allowing you to understand where you are today and where you’d like to go in your Agile future.
• Be truly Agile throughout the enterprise, focusing on customer value and employees over all else.

This book is geared for: Sponsors of Agile Transformations; Executives and Senior Management; Agile Coaches, Consultants, and Champions; Portfolio Management; Project Management Offices (PMOs); Business and Finance; Human Resources (HR); Investors and Entrepreneurs; Scrum Masters, Agile Project Managers, and Product Owners. 

This book concludes with an adventuring through an Agile Enterprise story that shows you how an enterprise may transform to Agile in an incremental manner with materials in this book.  Let the material in The Agile Enterprise help you achieve your successful customer value driven enterprise.

Thank you to the contributors JP Beaudry (on Story Mapping) and David Grabel (on Cost of Delay)!  A special Thank you to the Apress editing team!

What really is an MVP in an Agile World?

There is often a bit of misunderstanding of what is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in an Agile context (and I contend in any context).  MVPs are meant to provide the minimal functionality or feature set that will be useful to customers.  However, to attempt to define the minimal set up front means that you know what the customer wants from the start.  How often do you know what the customer wants at the beginning?

Instead, think of an MVP as an opportunity to learn what the customer wants, loves, and needs.  It should neither be fixed nor should you be certain of what it is.  Instead it should be considered an evolving concept from which you learn what the customer wants over time based on continuous feedback.  What mindset shifts might you have to make in order to adapt to what an MVP is in an Agile world? 

The first Agile mindset shift is the MVP is a draft.  Defining an final MVP upfront is akin to big-up-front planning and claiming certainty.  Instead, you hypothesize what the minimal set of features might be as a draft, and then have a mindset and practices where you validate your assumptions and hypothesis.  You start with an adaptable idea of what might be minimal and valuable to the customer. The moment you attempt to succinctly define the set of features, you are doing a disservice to your customer. 

The second Agile mindset shift is that customer feedback is key to evolving the MVP.  It is an opportunity to learn what the customer wants, loves, and needs.  If you want your MVP to align closely to customer value, you must include continuous customer feedback loops when working on an MVP.  These can take the form of customer demos or hands-on sessions.  Customer feedback can start as early as when you are hypothesizing what is an MVP and must be part of evolving the MVP to gain a strong inspect-and-adapt mindset with the inspect coming from the customer.  Eric Reis writes that an MVP “allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”  Customer feedback is the cornerstone to validated learning and establishing an MVP. 

So who really determines what is the MVP?  If you think the answer is you, your management, or your team, then maybe its time to Reduce your certainty and Ready your mind with the Agile mindset, discovery mindset, and Feedback loops. The right answer is the customer determines what is the MVP in Agile.  The more closely you align with customers throughout the effort, the more likely you will have an MVP that is considered valuable to the customer.          

Dangers of Certainty in Realizing Customer Value

Don Quixote was certain he saw Giants instead of windmills. In this epic story, he believed he knew the answers and saw what he wanted to see.  Unfortunately in many organizations, there is this same phenomenon, a need to act as if we are certain.  In fact, the higher up you go in an organization, the compulsion of acting with certainty becomes greater and greater.  Statements like “That’s why we pay you the big bucks” are used to imply that the higher in an organization, the more you are expected to just “know”. 

Some think they must act with “pretend certainty” for the benefit of their career.  Others have convinced themselves of “arrogant certainty” where they believe they know the answer or solution but don’t (or can’t) provide any solid basis for this certainty. Unfortunately this arrogance can be interpreted as confidence that can be dangerous to the success of a company.  Nassim Nicolas Taleb refers to “epistemic arrogance” that highlights the difference between what someone actually knows and how much he thinks he knows. The excess implies arrogance. 

What has allowed certainty within companies to thrive is that there is a distance between the upfront certainty and the time it takes to get to the final outcome.  There lacks accountability between certainty at the beginning and the actual results at the end.  Often times the difference is explained away by the incompetence of others who didn’t build or implement the solution correctly.

Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. The concept of certainty is actually dangerous to an enterprise since it removes the opportunity of acknowledging the options and allowing the enterprise to apply a discovery mindset approach toward real customer value via customer feedback loops and more.

We also want to avoid the inverse that is remaining in uncertainty due to analysis paralysis.  A way to avoid this is to apply work in an incremental framework with customer feedback loops to enable more effective and timely decision-making. Customer feedback will provide us with the evidence for making better decisions. Applying an incremental mindset will enable us to make smaller bets that are easier to make and allow us to adapt sooner. 

A healthier and more realistic approach is to have leaders who understand that uncertainty is actually a smart starting position and then apply processes that support gaining certainty. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us to have an approach that admits to limited information and uncertainty, and then applies a discovery process toward customer value. In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote forswears all the chivalric false certainty he followed so fervently.  Is it time for management to give up the certainty mindset they think they have and instead replace it with a discovery mindset as a better path to customer success? 

How can Portugal be a Technology and Business Leader on IT thru Agile practices?

The following is an article written based on an interview with Mario Moreira:   

Portuguese Companies have to combat risk aversion and rediscover their Vision of Discovery

This perspective is by Mario Moreira who specializes in Agile.  He was the keynote speaker during the first ScrumDay held in Portugal.  The initiative focuses on Agile and Lean approaches, where it promotes a philosophy of continuous adaptation to accelerate the ability of organizations to respond to change, as did the Portugues in the time of discoveries.  

Author of the book Being Agile: Your Roadmap to Successful Adoption of Agile, a blog on Agile Adoption, broad experience in this area, and a Vice President of Client Engagement at Emergn, he argues that Portuguese companies have to change their risk averse culture and improve adaptation strategies toward constant changes of the market, in order to maximize the opportunities for success in a global competitive landscape. And this is Agile, a concept which includes a set of adaptive concepts and software development methodologies that Mario Moreira came to Lisbon to help publicize and demonstrate at this event where in the morning featured presentations and afternoon joined the participants in a think tank.  

"At one point in history the Portuguese were the greatest explorers in the world and this was because we had the right mindset. We did not just go to India like everyone else," he stresses. "We decided to take some risks, to try something new with the awareness that we could bring great benefits. We need to recover that mindset," adds Mario Moreira."

To get there, we need to circumvent the risk averse culture constraining the Portuguese, because "the market is increasingly competitive and customers are demanding changes every day," said this expert, "considering that companies - in Portugal and the world - must increasingly be prepared to face these changes, trying to adapt to them, and this is where Agile can help."

The method gives flexibility to organizations to adapt to new inputs in the course of projects and promote the involvement of various actors, such as the client. Scrum fits this universe, as a framework for organizing and managing complex processes.  It is an alternative to traditional models, which are guided by a budget, a deadline and a chain of rigid decisions, together with a set of initial assumptions that are maintained throughout the project.

Mario Moreira argues that a market dominated by small and medium enterprises, as the Portuguese, the Agile philosophy makes even more sense because they are smaller companies who feel more pressure to respond on time to market requirements and its customers. They have less room to fail in terms of resources and too much competition.   

The original Portuguese version can be found at http://tek.sapo.pt/noticias/computadores/artigo/empresas_portuguesas_tem_de_combater_aversao_ao_risco_e_reencontrar_visao_dos_de-44423qlz.html