Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

Chapter 21Changing the OrganizationWith Ken Schwaber¹

Change is hard. Changing an enterprise’s behavior is harder still. But agile is worth it.

Overview

In the previous chapters, we described some of the substantive changes that the organization must address to achieve the full benefits of agility at the enterprise level. Changing engineering practices, reorganizing to address unnecessary team distribution, and managing the impact on operations and the marketplace, to name just a few, are not trivial issues to address in an enterprise of any scope.

Of course, if it were possible to achieve dramatic improvements in software productivity and quality at the stroke of a magic pen, every software executive today would be looking for that pen, price ...