4 Steps to an Agile Enterprise

By Ashley Owen on Mon October 31, 2011 11:05 AM

Many IT executives that I’ve spoken to have found great success with their agile development teams. Greater efficiency. Happier users. Faster cycle times. However, when they look beyond their agile teams, key roadblocks keep popping up. Bottlenecks with getting so many more sprints into production. Hybrid water-scrum-fall projects. Staying compliant with ever increasing regulations and standards. Disparate tools and distributed teams. Multiple environments and platforms. The list goes on and on, especially for enterprise IT organizations.
When it comes to agile in enterprise IT, the tension of speed versus control can seem impossible to resolve. However, some IT organizations have taken a process-based view to make the entire application delivery process more agile. They evaluate the process touch points between stakeholders across the entire lifecycle – from initial request to final release into production – to become truly agile. Orchestrating agility has helped IT organizations realize dramatic results, including 40% faster development, 50% lower costs, and 15X more releases.
How do they do it? Here are 4 steps to deliver agility across the entire IT organization, and not just within development.

1. Orchestrate Development to Deployment: IT organizations must not only coordinate development, operations and business – they need to automate this collaboration.
2. Develop with Agility: Development needs to more tightly integrate multiple disciplines and practices, multi-tier application development and global development teams, while taking advantage of virtualization and cloud computing.
3. Orchestrate Dev and Ops: Development needs to work more closely with Operations to meet the increasing velocity and volume of releases, while maintaining a closed-loop process with Service management to minimize the impact on data centers.
4. Orchestrate visibility and insight: IT is run as a business. So, IT organizations need unified visibility and insight from demand through development to release and ongoing service and maintenance.

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Ashley Owen is the Director of Orchestrated ALM Strategy at Serena Software. Ash has worked at Serena Software for more than 20 years and is passionate about solving application delivery problems spanning demand, development, and deployment.

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