Update 9th June: Download the free sample chapter on Team Design
The idea for this book germinated in May 2013 while I was preparing for a talk at DevopsDays, Berlin. My main argument in the talk was that while DevOps was great, it didn’t go far enough to influence business outcomes. However, when the rationale behind DevOps is applied to constituencies in addition to development and operations, we end up with a true cross-functional team that can be truly responsive to the market.
Within IT, Agile is commonly misconstrued as only
applicable to the development team. So teams end up adopting continuous
integration or even continuous delivery but it fails to improve overall IT and
business responsiveness. If we are to influence business outcomes, we need to
apply Agile principles and values to how we design teams, how we make important
decisions, how we fund IT development etc. This is what I refer to as an Agile
Organization Design—the stuff outside of team level engineering and process
agility.
Software is eating the world and IT is increasingly
strategic for every business. In the push to go digital, overall IT and
organizational agility matter more than ever.
With the help of real examples, I cover a wide range of issues that influence organizational
agility:
Chapters called Superstructure and Team Design address
structural issues. A chapter on Accountability addresses political issues.
Chapters called Alignment, Projects, Finance, Staffing, Metrics and Tooling
address operational issues. Chapters on Norms and Communications address
cultural aspects.
A rough cuts version is now available on Safari.
A rough cuts version is now available on Safari.