Succeeding with Agile

Chapter 4. Iterating Toward Agility

Historically, when an organization needed to change, it undertook a “change program.” The change was designed, had an identifiable beginning and ending, and was imposed from above. This worked well in an era when change was necessary only once every few years. Christopher Avery has written, “I think in the 1960s and 1970s this approach was probably more frequently successful than it has been in the 1990s and today because the frequency of change has intensified as competition has become global, and the model has broken down” (2005, 18). Avery continues by saying that “if the changes are coming so fast and furious that programmed change won’t work, perhaps we have to arrange ourselves (organizationally speaking) ...