In today’s world, companies must move faster than ever.

External factors such as globalization, emerging technologies, and new business models exposed by these technologies, along with internal factors like the ‘Facebook generation’ entering the work force, demand a more flexible, organic approach to optimizing not just your products or projects, but your systems and entire organization, such as being agile.

But being agile is nothing new.

Cutting-edge development shops have been espousing the core tenets of what we call “agile” methodologies since the mid-90s – Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Feature Driven Development, among others.  Practitioners of these methodologies may have had different approaches, focused on different aspects, and used different tools, but they all aimed to produce high-value, high-quality solutions in short time frames.  What was distilled into a philosophy for approaching software development with the Agile Manifesto, around the start of the new millennium, was soon expanded to include principles for project management with the Declaration of Interdependence in 2005.  As more and more organizations take these principles to heart, managing first their development, then their project teams, around these core ideas, they begin to look for the next step in their agile evolution.

So how does one become an agile organization?

Many different factors have contributed to this shift towards agile methodologies and companies are making the move to using agile outside its traditional stomping grounds.  Emerging technologies, such as the rise of SaaS and cloud systems, shifting business initiatives, as organizations look to capitalize on the ‘new’ internet model, and changing market pressures like those seen during the recent economic downturn, all fuel the drive for more, better, and faster.

Here at Bluewolf, we have seen this shift firsthand.  As our co-founder, Eric Berridge, talks about in his recent salesforce implementation post, being agile in your salesforce implementations or large projects is no longer enough- you must make the move to an agile organization to truly take advantage of the technologies and avoid the pitfalls of today’s business environments.

But remember, agile is a philosophy.

One word of caution – agile is a philosophy, an approach, not a specific process or action.  One mistake organizations often make when attempting to make the move to agile is to adopt the processes without changing the underlying philosophy.  A recent Gartner study titled “The Cultural Transition to Agile Methods: From ‘Me’ to ‘We’” expresses this well, as one of its key findings:

Moving to agile is mostly about culture and people, not process and technology.

Keep this in mind as you make your way along the path to agile- without organizational belief and the individuals to drive that belief, success will be hard to achieve.

Remember, there is no ‘magic bullet’ when it comes to implementing agile in your organization.  There are practices and processes, team/org structures, and timelines, but ultimately agile is, itself, agile.  Part of making the shift to an agile organization is finding what works for you, and improving on it through time and practice.  I have put together three building blocks that I believe are a good place to start in your agile evolution so let’s take a moment to introduce them here:

• Provide vehicles to continually communicate and collaborate with stakeholders
• Focus on value that can be delivered consistently and continuously (and can be measured)
• Develop a cadence of releases that your end users can easily “digest”

In future articles I will be elaborating on each of these, so stay tuned for more.