- GIVEN:
- Big Bang Enterprise Transformation (your whole organisation changes in one go in unison) is ineffective, and is coercively painful to the people who experience it
- WHEN:
- We seek to transform a whole enterprise
- THEN:
- Different parts of the organisation will start at different times and progress at different rates
- GIVEN:
- Different parts of the organisation start transformation at different times and progress at different rates
- All parts of the organisation have not yet completed transformation
- Our whole organisation is not organised as productised value streams
- Different parts of the organisation will be at different levels of transformation maturity
- WHEN:
- We seek to deliver complicated customer facing capabilities that require many parts of the organisation coming together
- THEN:
- We will have to integrate delivery from organisational units working in different delivery modes
Imagine a banking mobile app that integrates functionality from a highly agile iOS shop, life-cycle customer process, mainframe core banking and outsourced fulfilment centres and credit referencing.
What are your chances that all of those — now, at the end of 2016 — are going to be 100% Agile? You can complain about Bi-Modal being A Dumb Idea all you like. I’m going to refer you to this:
Things will start getting better when we start treating them as they are, not as we’d like them to beTorbjörn Gyllebring
Or, to summarise:
Whether or not Bi-Modal IT is a desired end state, in the transformation interim, it is inevitable. Life will be much better when we deal with this reality rather than denying it.
2 Recommendations so far
Martin Burns
Transformation Consultant at CA Inc (formerly Rally)
Previously: Leader of software delivery portfolios in large scale orgs.
Specialism: Transforming complex delivery organisations to be more Lean/Agile.
Mindset: Continuous Improvement Obsessive
Specialism: Transforming complex delivery organisations to be more Lean/Agile.
Mindset: Continuous Improvement Obsessive
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Bi-Modal Delivery is Inevitable. Get Over It. by Martin Burns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Followup piece to this is at
http://blogs.ca.com/2016/12/07/multi-modal-delivery-with-safe-4-0/
I am happy to see someone actually break with orthodoxy and actually speak what most of my customers are living through right now. Nor do I personally believe that every application should be developed in an Agile mode. Kaizan-style continuous improvement often has some value, but too many people are conflating Agile and Lean and get it wrong (or get scared by Big bang change).
It doesn’t help that so many organizations are developing Lean operations but insist on calling it something else (corporate America values leaders/innovators/plagiarizers, not followers).