Agile ICT uses Agile development methodologies in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Agile is a set development principle emphasizing flexibility, collaboration, and rapid iteration.
Agile ICT practices aim to deliver high-quality ICT-oriented business solutions and services quickly and efficiently. They involve close collaboration between cross-functional teams, frequent delivery of working software, and a focus on meeting customer needs and continuously improving the development process.
Agile ICT is particularly well-suited to projects with complex or rapidly changing requirements, where traditional, more rigid development approaches may be less effective.
Why should an organization implement an Agile strategy?
An Agile strategy enables organizations to deal with continuous change, allowing them to grow in an increasingly unstable, uncertain, complex, and unclear world. Companies must become as agile as the rapidly changing environment they find themselves in.
In an Agile organization, self-organizing teams always use customer value as a starting point. Because you do your work repetitively, constantly interacting with users, the organization can improve what it does for each user.
Agile is more about working smarter than harder, and it is not about doing more work in less time but about creating more value with less work. Agile responds to the overall challenge of today’s business world: how to provide immediate and trusted value to customers on a large scale. While organizations create much value through technology, implementing such technology is mainly driven by Agile management.
Classic old-school organizations have an “inward-looking” tendency, and delivering extreme internal customer experience is beyond the performance capabilities of an inward-looking bureaucracy. Internally driven innovation with new technologies that a classic organization delivers often results in changes that customers don’t want.
Delivering perfect customer experiences requires continuous collaboration between internal silos and customer interaction, which bureaucracies are not good at. Their hierarchically driven top-down communication also means bureaucracies cannot move fast enough to take advantage of innovative opportunities when they arise.
In a competitive environment, it is not technology that makes the difference since technology is available to all companies. The key is in how skillfully the organization uses the technology. The driving force behind continuous success is Agile.
Especially ICT teams can significantly profit from an Agile mindset. They should approach their users and business process owners with a customer mindset and strive to deliver the most value to these internal customers. Unfortunately, many classic ICT departments still don’t put value first and are lost in bureaucratic processes. Switching to an Agile approach might be very beneficial instead, but strong change management is required to get all people in your ICT department onboard.
Why an Agile ICT approach prevails over a classic (bureaucratic) approach
The first key characteristic of Agile organizations is the Law of the Small Self-Directed Team. Agile practitioners share the rationale that you should work in small independent multi-disciplinary teams that work in short cycles on relatively small tasks and receive continuous feedback from the ultimate customer or end user. The ICT team should position itself in the organization’s center to collaborate with all departments instead of working in an isolated silo.
During the first decade of the Agile movement (the early 2000s), the Agile movement spent a lot of time figuring out how to create high-performance teams systematically—working in teams is not a brand-new concept. Most people have experience working in a small team at one time or another where communication is effortless, and the group seems to think and act as one. When we are a member of such a team, we can analyze a situation, make a choice and act as if it were a single uninterrupted fluid movement. No manager tells you what to do, and you don’t have to wait for feedback for every decision. As a team member, your organization fully trusts you, and the organization is rewarded with this trust when you perform. It is almost as if the group has a collective brain. Direct conversations resolve all differences in views. Working in such a team is fun!
However, in the classical ICT department, the focus is not on teams but on individual functions. Classic departments break down work into small pieces. Individuals report to managers who ensure consistent and accurate performance under pre-established specifications. The manager of a manager does the same, and so on up the corporate ladder. Plans and budgets are created and allocated for every silo in the ICT department. In classic ICT departments, the link between each specific piece of work and its impact on a user and/or business process owner (the internal customers) is often hidden under a giant, inward-looking system. Because the effects of a specific piece of work are hidden, many employees of the ICT department are only involved in their particular tasks, making work much less motivating because they don’t see any result.
Surprisingly many ICT departments remain bureaucratic. One reason they don’t move to an Agile approach is that management strongly believes that Agile ICT teams cannot deliver disciplined and efficient performance on a large scale: they help solve complex one-off problems. However, for a (large) organization to keep the engine running, it is, in most cases, still the belief that a bureaucracy is better.
Another reason is that most teams are a team only in terms of appointment. Most of them are not real teams at all. The team leader behaves like any other boss in a bureaucracy.
The (internal) customer always comes first
The second characteristic of Agile teams is the Law of the Customer. When you strive for Agile teams in their purest form, those teams are obsessed with delivering value to their customers. Agile ICT teams operate the same: their users and business process owners are the internal customers, and the ICT team strives to generate the most value to these internal customers with all the provided ICT solutions. The voice of the internal customer is leading in this.
A “customer always comes first” mindset is the most challenging aspect of an Agile approach, which may sound odd because modern management styles have been preaching “the customer is number one.” However, many organizations (including ICT departments) continue to run an inward-looking hierarchical bureaucracy focused on delivering value to shareholders.
Bureaucratic organizations do not ignore their customers; these organizations also want to satisfy their customers as much as possible. However, these organizations do this only within the boundaries and limitations of their internal systems and processes. In the end, the customer always comes after profit in these organizations.
In a hierarchical bureaucracy, “the customer is number one” is just a slogan. In a fully oriented Agile organization, everyone is passionate and obsessed about delivering more value to their customers. Every Agile team has a clear view of their ultimate customer and can see how their work adds value to that customer. The team’s approach is that if their work has no (significant) added value to the customer, it immediately challenges itself with why they provide that specific type of support to these customers.
The ICT support team does this for its internal customers: goals, values, principles, processes, systems, practices, data structures, and incentives must add new value for the internal customer. The ICT support team must eliminate anything that does not contribute to this. Of course, the organization needs to back up this approach.
Maximizing the Agile approach
If only a single team in the organization (for instance, an ICT team) puts the Agile approach into practice, the benefits will be minimal. In some cases, it might even be counter-productive. The entire organization should facilitate a transparent network of employees working together toward happy internal customers. Sometimes an Agile team needs to take the responsibility to infect other departments with an Agile mindset. Organizations can be organically transformed from the inside by showing these departments the benefits of an Agile approach and by involving them in cross-department (ICT) projects.
When the entire organization embraces Agile, the organization looks less like a giant ship and more like a fleet of small speedboats. Instead of a stationary machine, the organization is an organic living network of self-managing teams. Managers implementing this principle recognize that competence is available throughout the whole organization and is not limited to one department of specialists: innovation can come from anywhere. The entire organization, including the top, is obsessed with delivering more value to customers: both internal and external. Agile teams take the initiative and collaborate with other Agile teams to solve everyday problems. The entire organization shares the same mindset in which the organization is seen and operated as a network of self-directed teams.
Misconception: Agile organizations are a “Black Box.”
A common misconception is that Agile organizations are necessarily flat or non-hierarchical. In Agile organizations, top management still has the important job of directing the organization. Agile organizations still review the quality of their employees and will take action in case of underperformance. The drive for better performance is more prevalent in Agile organizations than in traditional organizations. In a bureaucratic organization, underperformers can easily hide without anybody noticing their underperformance. In the Agile organization, transparency enables mutual accountability.
When teams are housed in an organization in networks, driven by horizontal communication focused on a common goal and acting at a common pace, these networks of small teams can handle significant complex problems surprisingly efficiently.
Final Thoughts
There are three key takeaways of an Agile strategy within an organization, including ICT teams:
- Small self-directed cross-functional teams
- A “customer always comes first” mindset
- The organization operates as an independent network of self-directed teams
Many ICT-oriented organizations have embraced Agile, but classic bureaucratic organizations don’t seem to get the hang of it, which is no surprise to me. But to my surprise, many other service organizations like healthcare also don’t seem to see the benefits of an Agile approach.
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