Change

Chapter 8Agile Methodologies That Build Sustained and Scalable Agility

“Agile” methodologies for helping enterprises adapt to a faster-moving and more demanding world came from software development in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although their roots probably go back as far as the 1950s. As we write this, Agile is still most often leveraged for software development, although it is “scaling”—that is, moving beyond software to other parts of enterprises. This evolution to broader applications looks somewhat the same as when “quality circles,” “continuous improvement,” and “Six Sigma” started in manufacturing/factories and then migrated elsewhere, or as “design thinking” started in product design and has now been tried across functions and industries.

It is easy to see why Agile has become fashionable. In a more unpredictable and rapidly changing world, it logically follows that you need more agility. And it is easy to posit a logic for why it started in software development.

By the 1990s, all medium and large firms had serious, expensive IT functions that had experience in going from one generation to the next of hardware or software. More often than not, those experiences were painful. Transitions took too long. Projects exceeded already sizable budgets. Sometimes enterprises simply failed and had to start over.

Back then, IT sometimes seemed like a budgetary black hole. Work often appeared to move at 15 miles an hour, which created pain both inside and outside IT. And that ...