Agile Transformational Approach & Architecture 9781716112034, 1716112036

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Agile Transformational Approach & Architecture

Muhammad Zeeshan Ali, PMP, PMI-ACP Saqib Javed John, PMP, PMI-ACP, ITIL OGMC Publications 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Organizational Governance Management Consultants (OGMC)

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. Although the author and the publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information entered in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or inconsistencies included herein. Any slights of people, places, or organizations are completely unintentional. “PMI”, “PMP”, “PMBOK” and “PMI-ACP” are certification marks in the United States and other nations, registered to the Project Management Institute, Inc. All inquiries should be addressed to (e-mail): [email protected] First Printing: 2021 ISBN: 978-1-716-11203-4 OGMC Publications ogmcpublications.com

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About Authors Muhammad Zeeshan Ali, PMP, PMI-ACP Author of multiple books and numerous articles elaborating new dimensions of Agile framework and Traditional Project Management along with his work on Performance Management, PMO, Leadership, Team Building and Personal Motivation. He is best known for designing the first of its kind “Performance Measurement Matrix” to calculate numberbased performance indicators and scoring for both Software Engineering Individuals and Teams. Zeeshan is a great advocate and promoter of adaptation of Agile Methodologies, Processes and Team Skill building. Zeeshan has over 18 years’ experience of managing 100+ mid-large scale, high visibility projects in both the Public and Private sectors. Experienced in managing several significant projects simultaneously and with a team spread over different geo-locations. Zeeshan has Degrees in Project Management (MS) and Computer Sciences (BS). He has been certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) and Agile Certified Professional (PMI-ACP) by Project Management Institute (PMI), USA.

Saqib Javed John, PMP, PMI-ACP, ITIL Saqib is one of the founding members and Managing Director of Organizational Governance Management Consultants (OGMC). He has professional expertise of more than 18 years of working on enterprise projects in various business domains ranging from a functional organization to projectized organization. Saqib has immense experience in developing and managing human behavior, process engineering and optimization, risk management, conflict management, performance maturity audits and policy-making. This is one of the reasons he is relatable to readers of Business and management professions. He is best known for his rapid-learning techniques and easy methods of practical implementations. He also has contributed to many anthologies. His work is helping thousands of students, teachers and professionals. Saqib is MS (IT), certified “Project Management Professional” (PMP) and “Agile Certified Practitioner” (ACP) from Project Management Institute (PMI) USA. He is also certified in “Information Technology Infrastructure Library” (ITIL) from Exin UK, “Sun Certified Java Programmer” (SCJP) and “Sun Certified Web Component Developer” (SCWCD) from Sun Microsystems USA.

Zeeshan and Saqib are also the Authors of Key Notes Series of PMP, ACP, RMP, ITIL, Inside Familiar Management, Private Life of Management, Applied Psychosomatic Planning and Agile Beyond Boundaries which are gathering a lot of attention among the students, practitioners and professionals of business and management sciences. All their publications can be reviewed at publications.ogmcs.com Both actively publish their exclusive articles and their blog can be reached at blog.ogmcs.com

Dedicated to all the readers and those who inspired this work.

Table of Contents 1.0

EMERGENT ARCHITECTURE

1.1

ADAPTIVE AND PRAGMATIC

1.2

ACUTE INTEGRATION

1.3

DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

1.4

ENTERPRISE PORTABILITY

1.5

EMBEDDED REUSABILITY

2.0

TRANSFORMING WAY OF WORKING

2.1

REALITY DRIVEN DIGITALIZATION

2.2

GENERALIZED SPECIALIST APPROACH

2.3

GOAL ORIENTED CULTURE

2.4

COLLABORATIVE BEHAVIOR

2.5

LEAN TRANSITIONING

3.0

ADAPTIVE PLANNING APPROACHES

3.1

FUTURISTIC DECISION-MAKING

3.2

PROGRESSIVE ACCELERATING

3.3

ITERATIVE VALIDATION

3.4

CLIENT INVOLVEMENT

3.5

EMBRACE CHANGE

4.0

VALUE DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY

4.1

EVOLUTIONARY DIRECTIVES

4.2

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY REVERENCE

4.3

STRUCTURED SCALING

4.4

INCREMENTAL USABILITY

4.5

BUSINESS ORIENTED ACCEPTANCE

5.0

DOING AGILE' VS. 'BEING AGILE'

5.1

RIGHT INNOVATIVE MINDSET

5.2

EVOLUTIONARY CULTURAL ALIGNMENT

5.3

VALUE PROPOSITION

5.4

HIGHEST IMPACTFUL RETENTION

5.5

EMOTIONAL COMMITMENT

Preface This is the 1st book in the Series of Agile Organizational Transformation, which effectively and optimally provides the guidelines to change the existing corporate culture to achieve a competitive advantage and to address the significant challenges of unprecedented disruption and market turbulence. This book focused on approaches and strategies related to people and processes. Organizational Transformation is vitally significant for companies to succeed and grow through successful adoption and understanding. Transformation is about modifying beliefs and actions to achieve the desired results. The fundamental purpose of this book is to provide a guide for successful redesign tailor-made framework to breed new value, to crack new opportunities, to energies new growth and to transport new efficiencies. Transformation of culture and work processes tend to produce significant improvement in organizational performance. This book consists of the mindsets and behavior that you want to learn in order to move towards embracing organizational and individual transformation.

1.0 Emergent Architecture

Emergent Architecture is based on systemic learning, prototyping and innovation which cannot be adapted effectively unless the fundamental transformation of existing skills and work culture. In Emergent Architecture, decentralized decision-making is deeply interwoven to enable innovation and adaptation. Emergent Architecture supports Agile Framework to simplify the collaboration and to ensure that ‘system always runs’. It also provides the technical synchronization for an evolutionary and incremental delivery. Another aspect of Emerging Architecture is to bridging the gap between the grassroots-tech culture and different parts of the business. Emergent design is more disciplined and pragmatic which presents a consistent focus on delivering functionality and discovering new knowledge, new learnings, new ideas, new concepts, new engagements, new models and innovative strategies, above all it’s also used to strengthen and broaden the impact of leadership. An emergent design is not a grounded theory limited only to data collection and analysis but in fact a process of discovering and extending the architecture, it also welcomes unanticipated information from conceptualization to publication. Emergent design enables teams with local control to future-proof the system. Agile Framework is a well-balanced alignment of intentionality and emergence to enhance solution, performance and usability. The intentional architecture ensures the conceptual integrity as fit-forpurpose, and the right balance of emergent design and intentional architecture is the key to handle large-scale systems effectively.

1.1 Adaptive and Pragmatic The religion, purity and discipline of Agile really means for business. Adaptive and Pragmatic Agile removes the rituals and fanaticism surrounding Agile, and focuses on enterprise work done across the board with better quality, better control and greater teams. In fact, Adaptive Project Management is a direct outgrowth of an earlier agile framework. Adaptive is an opposite strategy in comparison with predictive planning. Adaptive and Pragmatic Agile is an approach that evaluates theories of requirements in terms of the success of their practical implementation. This approach deals with the projects sensibly to keep them realistic and practical rather than enforcing philosophical or theoretical principles. In other words, continuous devotion to upright design and technical brilliance enhances agility and helps to find the best fit. There are many ways to accomplish a task but usually project teams continuing to do what they had always done rather than adopting a right approach of pragmatism. You will never ask carpenter to design a house. Apparently it is uncommon but the best and concrete advice is to hire an agile architect who believes in adaptive and pragmatic architect because inefficient and inadequate design ultimately creates cyclomatic complexity which finally converts into project disaster. The architect or designer is the real bridge between the client requirements, user’s perspective, functional specifications, technical specifications and final delivery. Pragmatic Agile is a serious transformational approach about the design, architect and techniques.

The Manifesto for Agile deliveries is very much with a pragmatic and common sense approach which applies across the industry and organizations for teams, projects, business road mapping and marketing. Pragmatic and Adaptive structure is all about uncovering better ways to deliver solution value through continuous integration, continuous communication, efficient workflows and Quick corrections in a more convenient and productive way. In today’s proactive business-oriented world, along with digital identity digital skills also demands greater flexibility and adaptability.

1.2 Acute Integration Acute Integration focus on delivering improved business value and organizational alignment. it’s important to have insight into acute integration between client expectations, tools, techniques and solutions. This integration creates opportunities for innovation and digital optimization in business. For such a distributed integration, Agile provides the required environment and architecture including connectors, containers and APIs which also brings an improved alignment in the project execution, completion and postimplementation by constantly adapting and incorporating the changes and demands needed by the customers. Since Agile is a mindset more than a framework, it’s easy to integrate with the other methodologies and approaches, e.g. waterfall, in order to create more-suited hybrid frameworks. Through Agile Integration culture, there is an opportunity to building better infrastructure as Agile alliance ensures rapid and repetitive changes in the various stages with speed, flexibility and autonomy. Agile integration encourages the rapid cultivation of new plans and the rapid implementation of new configurations. Organizations must open to Agile Integration as it isn’t only about the technical change, digitalization or harnessing the best-of-breed technology but in fact to integrate business potential with the existing environment to adapt the change with ease and grace. Integration can be between system and sub-systems, programs and sub-programs and projects and sub-projects and as a functional whole its business integration with the other parts of businesses. The

purpose of acute integration is to resolve any inconsistencies, instability, complexities and irregularities. Agile spirit and trust behind integration are to successfully roll out the mutual trust and elastic stability between business processes, methodologies and work culture, which is the biggest driver of organizational architectural change. The fine-grained richness and built-in intelligence underlying agile integrations present disparity where no matter how diverse, the complex is your multi-cloud landscape and business end-system. In a nutshell Agile Acute Integration is the integration of people, processes, technology and architecture to improve productivity, operational consistency and portability.

1.3 Dynamic Perspective Agile is now a global subject across a wide range of organizations, which is transforming the world work culture. Organizations continually find ways to manage the dynamic and volatile context of the business to increase the value for their customers. “Agile” is an effective, competitive and dynamic working model with a high trust to design and deliver the right project, product or service with the highest business value in the shortest possible time. Organizational dynamic agility generates rapid and better results in a business context of evolving requirements where speed and flexibility are essential factors to succeed. Dynamic Agile creates empirical synergy between stakeholders and the development team to continually monitor and adapt to the unexpected. In order to fully understand the client’s vision, Agile in its dynamic context maintain a continuous level of quick and frequent collaborations among all parties to build up a trusting and authentic relationship across the project, program or portfolio. Agile introduces dynamic predictability as one of its core features which include time-boxed cost, schedule and delivery as the amount of work done which ultimately improves the decision-making and reduces the complex sensitivity. Another dynamic feature of Agile is flexibility which is the key to accept change and continually reprioritize to deliver the customer-driven business value while reducing common risks. Agile always keep an eye on real business value and end-users which improve and mature the overall quality of the entire project life cycle and workflow.

Agile manners like thinking scientifically to find your way, decentralized command-and-control, decision making downwards and make efforts closer to the objective are the proven scalability to address projects of all sizes and for any business sector. Agile modify the dynamics of an organizational functions and projects life cycle to deliver smart product-service systems. Agile uses the brainpower of an organization to transform adaptive quality and speed.

1.4 Enterprise Portability Agile is perfect for the corporate world due to its competitive advantage, portable structure, customized strength and durability. Agile methodology has been widely adopted, as it's efficient for both the client and the team executing the work. A deeper dive into multidisciplinary Agile, you will find Agile framework architectural design is better and works comprehensively, where nothing is left midstream. Agile is portable because it mostly relying on the enthusiastic winds of the project team and customer collaboration. The more trust grows between the project team and client the more portability and transparency increases at an enterprise level and this is the core of being agile. At the global level, lots of C-Level executives are becoming agile. Many enterprises are adopting agile work culture. There is no room for rigidity in Agile. Being an end-to-end agile on an enterprise level is all about thinking differently. The purpose of enterprise agility is to create a more logical and efficient framework for getting work done. Projects in enterprise environments, typically confronted with mission-critical information that seriously requires portable design, structure and development, and Agile has the fundamental capacity and control to meet such a requirement and transformation. Keep the focus on enterprise-scale agile to move or transform an entire organization, as enterprise portability is underpinned by agile thinking and mindset. The idea of agile enterprise portability and thinking needed to go beyond any specific industry and should

become part of the fabric of how businesses run because enterprise enablement optimizes the way the organizations perform. Enterprise Agile is both a philosophy and a strategy.

1.5 Embedded Reusability Reusability is a clear principle of Agile which is in simple words can be described as Object-Oriented Design, which means build an object once and reuse it as many times as needed. The embedded approach and behavior of reusability within the agile architecture, methodologies and processes improves the product quality and team productivity. Agile also make a significant increase in the success rate of systemic reuse of requirements, artifacts, performance review process. Reusable elements not only accelerate the current project deliveries but also the future projects. Reusability can be implemented through configurable frameworks, a model-driven approach and traceability. These technologies make the reuse of fine-grained components a viable proposition, by reducing the effort of building them from scratch. In this prospect, besides lightweight or heavyweight scope of work, Agile projects may benefit the most as the Agile framework provides the more enhanced, recommended, practical, proactive and welltested opportunity for reuse. Agile recommends and promotes harvesting (i.e. reuse) a little alongside the traditional approach of building them from scratch. Reusability genuinely speeds up project execution and sometimes gives a giant leap towards completion through small-grained components, which ultimately reduces the time, cost and efforts of the project. As for 1st-time organizations pay to build a feature, 2nd time bear the cost of reusability and 3rd time it's free. The agile environment encourages emergent reusability i.e. ‘design for reuse’ means design with an approach of reusability right from the

start which is facilitated by a common build system throughout the project life cycle. In the genuine rhythm of Agile, reusability and agility present effective coupling hand in hand.

2.0 Transforming Way of Working

Organizations across the globe are focusing on transformation using digital technologies and advanced analytics to unlock new dimensions of productivity, flexibility, and speed for improvements in customerfocused delivery. An organizational business-revolution-in-thetransformation is greatly accelerating to simply the business complexity through new channels, new capabilities and new ways of value delivery. Agile new-way-of-working and continuous innovations in a business environment characterized by design structure, people’s performance and customer satisfaction. Ceding control to self-managed teams plays a critical and ongoing role of “framing through action”. The effectiveness of a new way of working depends on the right balance of control, digitization, engagement and support. A new work environment or evolved workplace culture involves the transformation of human resources, digitalizing the end-to-end customer experience, delivering value to the business and its customers. Organizational transformation is a major challenge and a fantastic opportunity at the same time as transformation efforts often run into roadblocks, resistance to change and unrealistic expectations. Acquiring corporate culture and implementing optimal business processes is important to make digital transformation strategies successful. Everyone from top to down needs to be willingly open to ongoing transformation and requires a new way of thinking, sometimes this requires a radical change in mindset to adopt a persistent customer-centric approach across the organization.

2.1 Reality Driven Digitalization It’s about the business transformation, restructuring of products and services around digital capabilities and cultural shift towards the digital world. 90% of organizations adopted or have plans to adopt a ‘being digital’ as their first strategy to improve digital capabilities through new technologies. Digital transformation requires a lot of tactical-level decision-making constantly. “Digitization” is sometimes even being used interchangeably with “cloudification. Digital transformation emphasis on “Transformation” which is essentially digitizing analog processes to make efficiency gains around digital capabilities in many areas like communication, internal or customer-facing analytics, sales channels, data storage, project management, structured products and services, etc. Agile practices propose and fully support the digital transformation to capture and utilize data to be more proactive, responsive and adaptive towards the customer needs and market conditions because long-term competitive advantage lies with providing data-enhanced capabilities to customers. Digitization is a reality and adapting it lies with the “executive muscle” of the organization because it is a company-wide effort. Project managers, in particular, play a vital role during a digital transformation. An enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a common example of a technological transformation, the puts a lot of power and decision making. There are many challenges with digital transformation, it can’t be implemented without proper and well-adapted cultural transformation in the organization.

Digital Transformation is inevitable but not a silver bullet, so keep recognizing and respecting legacy processes along with adapting the reality of digitization, very pragmatically, organizational habits don’t change quickly, here agile values, agile principles and agile leadership play an important role. Different departments and client-facing platforms have different levels of responsibility and risk. Successful digital transformations occur through embracing digital agility, transformative vision, innovative customer engagement and datadriven digital visualization.

2.2 Generalized Specialist Approach The concept of ‘Agility in General’ or ‘General Agility’ is broadly classified under the agile umbrella which expresses constant inspection and adaptation. Large complex projects in distributed environment generate a strong need for generalized framework and practices. A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and supper skilled of a few which makes a big difference in value delivery. The people who are generalizing specialists are in the "sweet spot" between the two extremes of being either just a specialist or just a generalist. Generalizing specialists are often referred to as multidisciplinary, cross-functional, deep generalists. The team that has the capability of working knowledge in a variety of roles known as the team of generalized specialists. The generalized specialist also does not mean a jack of all trades. In fact, the purpose of generalized agility is to uncover better ways of doing a specific task and also helping others to do it. Strong critical thinking, exploratory business analysis, fearless refactoring and automation are the basic prerequisites to grow a team of generalized specialists who can make a huge productivity difference. Specialists usually become bottlenecks, reducing overall team efficiency, when work queues up with them but a generalizing specialist is someone with a good grasp of how everything fits together who believes in less documentation and improved flexibility. Generalizing specialists are more effective, visible, transparent and palatable and contribute in any way that they can.

In a nutshell, Agile is not prescriptive in nature and there is no black and white world anymore, hence the approach of utilizing agile generalizing specialists approach is the need of current times to deal and scale various needs, situations and complexities for today’s business world. Specialization is for insects and Generalized Specialization Framework is for the human being.

2.3 Goal Oriented Culture Transformation towards the goal-oriented culture always truly depends on overcoming the barriers, people behavior, improvement approach, fast decision cycles and understanding depth and adoption of best practices. Goal-oriented culture is mostly objectives-centered who cocreates value for all stakeholders and tends to be more straightforward and précised. Optimized processes help sustain the culture in a larger perspective. Agile work culture is performance-oriented and scientifically competent by nature having core and instinctive unprecedented effectiveness and efficiency. Agile promotes corporate collaborative culture instead of a control culture. In a deeper look, agile culture is all about continuous growth and cultivation. Mindset and people transformation across the organization are the major factors required to meet the optimal conditions for a smooth and successful culture shift. Organizations as machines need balance, stability and dynamism. Organizations having goal-oriented culture puts objectives at the center, and accordingly engages and empowers people collaboratively and effectively to build a flexible and strategic work environment. Goal-oriented approachability includes focused and professional work discipline which must require for organizational effectiveness and value delivery. On the opposite side organizations never grow with easygoing discipline and if the work culture is means-oriented or employee-oriented. Agile creates a cohesive and evolving environment for a common

goal-oriented optimal culture to accommodate fast-changing priorities and disruptive trends, where the agile team, being a self-steering organization, defines the best way to reach goals, prioritize activities and focus their effort.

2.4 Collaborative Behavior Truly, collaborative agile culture is based on effective communication between the team members, client and other stakeholders, there is no doubt, the project at the end is delivered by teams, not tools. Emphasize the importance of the people and their collaboration is very significant. Collaborative behaviors depend on rich communication, transparency, trust and openness. A collaborative attitude is more about selforganizing rather than technically-driven. The objective behind collaborative culture is to develop a user-focused environment. Collaboration is the core of Agile behaviors. Collaborative intentions, efforts and performance have a direct contribution in project success. Collaboration structure is the most significant factor of the Agile workplace design. The most key elements which reduce the collaboration are the blame game, defensive and self-promotion and on the opposite side, the elements which increase the collaborative culture are self-awareness, selfaccountability, interpersonal relations, focus on objectives, and active response on feedbacks and a win-win attitude. Missing sweet and blind spots during communication and interactions create mistrust and miss understandings between teams. Collaborative behavior demands focused attention on a Common Goal. Organizations can achieve significant results by and working together through collaborative behavior for a higher cause. it’s in their best interest to utilize critical skills required for building and sustaining collaborative relationships.

2.5 Lean Transitioning Lean transformation or transitioning of working methodologies is an important component of Transformational Approach and Architecture, which includes lean business-case, lean thinking approach, lean flow, lean best principles, practices and processes, lean discipline competencies, lean tools and techniques, Lean organizational system and structure, and ultimately lean governance. Lean-Agile establishes lean methodologies to provide a continuous flow of value-added activities among cross-domain teams and complex environments. Agile default provides the culture of continuous improvement and continuous value streams. Adopting the Lean way of working is aligned to meet mission requirements through the capability of dealing with multiple complex systems, environments and unknown-unknowns which finally leads to successful delivery, service or product. Lean thinking competency is the right approach based on reducing waste and mission-enabling technologies and de-risking distributed environment. Transitioning or transformation to an Agile-Lean working environment is deeply ingrained with the evolution of Lean Thinking. Transitioning to agile lean methods or making the current processes of the organization lean can be challenging as this requires significant effort from many areas within the organization, mostly face roadblocks and internal resistance. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to agile adoption, the only way is to build required support, architect lean design, establish a realistic and lean roadmap to a successful agile transitioning.

3.0 Adaptive Planning Approaches

Agile (aka “Adaptive”) and Waterfall (aka “Predictive”) are two of the most common project management approaches that organizations use for project management. The adaptive approach is relatively new where requirements and solutions evolve over a predefined period of time. Adaptive planning embodies a practical commonsense approach which is an action rather than a reactionary. Agile embraces adaptive planning for incremental small deliverables through continuous evolving of understanding, rapid responses, continuous improvement, adoption and adaptation to change. This is an interactive approach to learning by doing and a real-time experience. Adaptive planning is best suited for evolving projects that face continuous change. Adaptive planning breaks a project into small components to allow ultimate flexibility and openness to change which may yield surprising outcomes and an overall result of a project may differ substantially from the original intent. The adaptive approach needs adaptive teams who believe in a collaborative effort of self-organizing, cross-functioning and transparent relationship with the customer and end-user to deliver what they really want. The agile approach gives prominence to teamwork, customer collaboration, and flexibility. The adaptive team proactively responds to changes. Adaptive management is the best for highly-uncertain projects with high rates of change, complexity and risk. Adaptive implementation, monitoring and control play an integral role to reduce uncertainty. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the adaptive strategy is always better than a predictive strategy.

On the other hand, Waterfall is a traditional, linear and plan-driven approach, believing in sequential flow, upfront planning, predictable tools, a predictable experience where each and every project follows the same life cycle by giving importance to the factors like cost, scope, and time, completing one phase before proceeding to the next phase. Adaptive planning has a definite capacity to run several plans simultaneously, however, to operationalize adaptive approach, organizations must need genuine trans-disciplinary mode and a continuous generation of new knowledge to maximize the benefits and to achieve long-term and broad objectives.

3.1 Futuristic Decision-making The Agile is purpose-driven, the current and future trends for Agile strategic planning, methodologies and decision-making is in an accelerating mode towards its bright and promising future in all industries. Agile Leaders invest time in understanding the problems of their customers or users. While the Agile Team together drives the future roadmap of the enterprise objectives and goals. The technology and tools have made data gathering and churning numbers a lot easier. The more the data is better, the faster is the decision making. Agile brings alignment across the project/product to bring the maximum benefit. Agile is a philosophy that cannot be contained within just 12 principles. There is more to it and it’s a future of project management. Agile evolve a significant change, autonomy and trust in the way decisions are made through leadership, decentralization and selforganizing. True agility is not only about project management, in fact, It’s also about strategic decision making, governance and organizing structure. Futuristic decision making is always aligned with human’s capability to do things and ability to make important decisions, solving problems that shift focus on improvement. Futuristic decision making also demands a clear vision and path to get to that. It involves transparency at each level and building professional relations not just with the people you work for but also the people you work with.

3.2 Progressive Accelerating Agile development is a progressively and iteratively accelerated working process or paradigm while considering the balance between stability, predictability and dynamism. This is also called Rolling Wave Planning or Progressive Elaboration. This elaboration includes requirements, architecture and design planning, acceptance criteria, the definition of ‘done’ methods, estimates, testing and information which finally emerge into output as product or service. The objective is to improve the outcome and to deliver high-value features by exploiting maximum opportunities and capabilities through more accurate estimates. Multiple planning iterations accommodate project evolution and customer expectations. Planning and execution sessions are conducted throughout the project due to emerging requirements by using techniques, such as Planning Poker or Affinity Mapping. In the Age of Agility, to deal with Agile Imperative international business and corporate market growth, its integral to recognize the reality of agile mastery which is the adoption of progressive process building, clarity, knowledge and experience. The other keys to deal with the progressive acceleration are the automation of process management, testing and best practices, and decomposition of Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The concepts of progressive elaboration or rolling wave planning sound quite scientific, structural, systematic and meaningful proven but are not only for Agile environments but it’s equally applicable for traditional project management. The best is to adopt a progressive

mindset and a self-Organizing attitude. Progressive elaboration needs flawless collaboration with flexibility, facts-based decision-making, self-organizing principles, facilitation guide, great accountability, active participation and motivated teams. Acceleration is too good to be true but positive, productive and practical acceleration is must require for Disciplined Agile Framework, because negative accelerations are expensive, create obvious problems and communicative difficulties for the team, client and all stakeholders.

3.3 Iterative Validation Project sponsors, managers and teams are increasingly interested in deploying and adopting agile processes and practices in their organizations and to implement new procedures and methods of iterative, tailored and systematic validation for all inputs, output, tools and techniques. It’s much required to fulfill the ideology of continuous improvement of organizational practices, to gain feedback rapidly, to integrate opportunities with deliverables and to utilize product realization experience. A systematic iterative approach is required to validate the planning and implementation which also ensures regulatory compliance and also improves learnings, enhances functional capabilities and evolves the product design. During validation, it’s very important to manage the complete documentation and traceability of all changes. Good communication between the development teams, validation teams and other stakeholders is a key factor for flawless and quality executions. Validation aims to support product quality and to build the rights thing. However, verification activity still needs to be carried out effectively and efficiently. In larger business requirements, the iterative nature of the validation cycle helps by demonstrating traceability from requirements and functional specifications to testing. In an iterative development context, validation should be a collaborative process directly involved with the development approach, otherwise, in some cases more timeconsuming. Validation activities mainly include identification of

business and user needs, iterative analysis, development, verification and Traceability.

3.4

Client Involvement One of the key contributions behind a successful project is regular client involvement. Rinse-n-Repeat on client’s feedback is an obvious activity. Gathering all the requirements upfront and then delivering in one go, usually and mostly fails. The client must be knowing what’s going on in each phase or segment of key deliverables, to avoid later issues. No strategy and methodology work without client involvement and vision. Its required, to make sure that you are on the right track. Client involvement also makes continuous improvements and effective increment of features during the entire development cycle. Managing client involvement is a continuous effort to build what exactly is required and to get meaningful sign-off, otherwise, problems can go beyond control. The impact of client involvement is enormous, even if needed, educate your client on the importance to participate. The real goal is to deliver a high-quality product through client acceptance, so it’s important to be in line with the client's desires and expectations which only possible with the client’s active participation. In other words, a better client relationship contributes to the success of projects, products and services, which on a larger frame, in fact, maintained through the organizational culture. The client’s involvement should be highly appreciated, they can review the product at each stage and can provide feedback and suggestions for improvement. Client positive involvement builds the right quality efficient and cost-effective product, reduce risks and increase predictability, which also helps to maintain transparency, continual development, early delivery and at the same time ensures the credibility of the work being done.”.

3.5 Embrace Change It’s often hard, tough and sometimes quite hateful to embrace the change but also one of the true and most potentially empowering. But to change being only for the bad reasons is also not true. but it is the core of Agile, and that is what makes Agile so powerful. It’s one of the most competitive advantages of Agile. However, for sure, embrace the change for a reason and to provide a value of some kind. According to Agile practices and principles, embrace change for specific goals, you neither have to accept every change for the sake of embracing change nor get panic. How one approaches the change, which makes the real difference. Mostly, the change and complexity come together and being agile we need to embrace and tackle both together. There is a need to understand the importance of change in the current market and era, if need, it cannot be overlooked or escaped from, it is more important to be flexible. The concept of change is to accept it and adapt accordingly even if it’s over following a strict or predefined plan as mostly it turns into a competitive advantage. Follow an adaptive manner that enables change throughout the project, product or service lifecycle, agile is transforming change management. As organizations have become with the old and in with the new methodologies. An organization must embrace value-added changes in scope more effectively and fluently.

4.0 Value Driven Development & Delivery

There is a clear difference between the schedule driven by plans vs ensuring focus on the delivery of value by learning and adapting as you go. The value in terms of monetary, compliance, market, product competitive value delivered to the customer and end-user, return on investment (ROI), internal rate of return (IRR), and net present value (NPV). So, the suggested feature, capability, or function must coherent with cost-effectiveness, maintainability, scalability, performance, and security. The Value-driven delivery is based on early and frequent value deliveries to stakeholders. The value-driven delivery is a combination of the right collaboration, demonstration, early feedback and rethinks on the approach process. This works even better in complex projects to define the paradox of value that is to extract value-in-exchange from value-in-use. This environment creates a culture of engagement. A focus on value is time-taking and tricky as it prevents scope creep and gold-plating while assuring that no value is left unrealized. Popular approaches include Test-driven Development and Featuredriven Development. For Value-driven Delivery, it is important to prioritize the high-value requirements in the Prioritized Product Backlog. Along with mindset, Value-Driven Development and Delivery (VD3) need a set of checklists like sticky notes, time-tracking tools, and procedures. Figure out that who’s using it. This allows us to prioritize each feature by aligning on value and creating clarity. it’s important to empower the individuals, the simplest and quickest way to fix the problems is value-driven development. This allows for early corrections and avoidance of dead-end development options.

4.1 Evolutionary Directives This doesn’t mean a highly directive management style or an execution-machine, but in fact, evolution and agile are hand in hand together emphasized empowering through closer cooperation and supportive approach. Management should remove the impediments and supply the tools needed, to get the job done. Many organizations still run old, top-down, directive paradigms which is mostly not compatible with an evolutionary working environment. Agile evolutionary directives help an organization to develop resultoriented processes and the right culture for the businesses in demand with technology. Another objective of agile directives is to meet an ROI through all the services we provide to our customers and at the same time also focus on the critical path and cost variation of the project. Agile talks about empiricism, emphasize using common sense which allows you to learn to find the solutions to improve the way of working. Evolutionary directives are the base of agile iterative and incremental approaches. It is interesting to note that there is no starting point, nor is there an ending point, instead you iterate back and forth between activities as required. With an evolutionary approach, your working models and processes are developed over time throughout your project in a continuous manner. The bottom line is that to work with an agile team, need an evolutionary approach. It is the only choice to work in this way. Agile teams embrace change and therefore decide to work in an evolutionary manner. This is the model that should last throughout the entire cycle of Agile evolution.

4.2 Customer Centricity Reverence The trend to be realized and recognized that successful projects or products are always the results of a customer-centric approach, hence as a matter of policy, align the organization’s strategic goals with customer involvement for the competitive advantage. Active customer engagement is an important norm because lack of customer engagement directly affects the performance of the project team and ultimately of an organization. Above all, the customer-centric approach reduces complexity around requirements, expectations and dimensionality. A customer-centric approach also may lead the organization to rethink its core values as it should be embedded within every single person and process of your organization. Customer centricity is very important to build longstanding relationships, future business and to imply successful strategic initiatives. Organizations to determine the consistent and continuous reviews of customer-centric processes to improve and to become more proactive. Agility needed to be alert, to follow through on your word, to follow up on your promises and to build trust with customers. Customer-centric mindset, framework, methods and tools also help to reshape an organization, to understand customer preferences, to remove execution bottlenecks and make better real-time operational decisions. This approach is not only beneficial for the organizations but equally good for the customer experience, customer intelligence, customer transformation and customer empowerment. Successful customer-centric businesses truly involve customers in

business strategy. Customer-centric organizations actively use the feedback approach to best engage in end-to-end, long-term and trusted relationships. customer-centricity create more expectations towards the growth, benefits, contributions and delivery.

4.3 Structured Scaling Structured scaling of projects across multiple teams and organizations is more effective, faster, predictable and practical with Agile frameworks. For balancing advance competitive variables and trends, traditional structures of the decades-old iron triangle of planning no longer work. Strategically, agile shifts mindsets to the unified front of business objectives, predictable delivery, cross-team collaboration, sustainable principles, practices, outcomes and above all customer satisfaction. All of this encourages companies and various enterprise layers to rely upon agile as it has the ability to drive organizations. In a broader prospect, structured scaling of agile is a clear-cut cultural transformation of people and practices to execute according to organizational strategy. Ultimately, scaling decision-making, transparency and alignment around work into the DNA of the organization. In a result, organizations may have scaled agile practices in play right from conception till delivery. Transformational agility is beyond the basics of scaling agile. Agile Spotify must-haves of structured scaling culture and improves systems thinking of self-organization, cross-functional efficiency across large numbers of teams, learning-oriented workflow and empower proactive decisions at enterprise scale. Many organizations formalized guiding principles of scaling and have had great success and clear benefits by evolving their processes, teams, and by incorporating the strategy of common organizational patterns and customer-centric approach using agile frameworks.

4.4 Incremental Usability Usability is a critical quality attribute of a product, feature, function or system which includes learnability, effectiveness, sustainability, and end-user satisfaction. Products usually suffer from usability challenges, make the strategy to bring broad modeling at the beginning and usability practices into maturity, as agile incrementally delivers high-quality. Agile usability engineering increases management values through an incremental approach along with the ability to adjust directions based on the feedback rather than throwing it all over the wall to lose. Usability depends on the bigger-picture of the user-centered approach and design thinking, considering design implications and avoiding the rigid way of working. There is no quick playbook, rather successful interfaces, designs and architectures emerge through embracing uncertainty and improvised agile workflows ensure good usability. Incremental usability is a working strategy that needs an extra careful coat of thought while designing features, structure and content as research of behavioral insights must go beyond simplicity. Like acceptance testing, also usability testing requires very controlled systematic testing. On agile projects, usability testing should occur after each iteration. Often Usability is considered as opposite to adopt change. Agile is all about flexibility but not adopting something just for the sake of it. Agile believes in reducing waste but protects what the core essence of any processes that are involved.

4.5 Business Oriented Acceptance It’s extremely important to understand the behavior of the business, understanding requirements in the real life of the business scenarios and customer behavior to achieve business-oriented acceptance, desired output and customer needs. This approach is used to satisfy the customer needs by increasing focus, communication and value. Which is also based on the behavior-driven development, right prioritization of solutions and more agile verification and validation activities. The user-focused business perspective leads to the trend of businessoriented acceptance, not just the traditional black and white requirements. Never skip it and don’t take writing acceptance criteria lightly, ideally write this before implementation having clear and signed-off pass-fail results. Writing effective acceptance criteria specifications is the most critical and challenging factor of this thought, as we should be fairly more business-oriented. Well-written business authority exceptions including decomposed corner and edge cases that need to be handled but in a lighter easily understandable form of documentation instead of over drafting with complex and long descriptions, establish boundary neither too broad nor too short. The objective of this approach is to keep the focus on solution result including functional and non-functional, also maintaining the balance of need and performance.

5.0 Doing Agile' vs. 'Being Agile'

Differentiating is critical for successful Agile transformations. As “being” creeps into “doing” that’s where the biggest value for the business is. Being Agile Being Agile is a journey, paradigm shifts in cultures, behaviors, attitudes, habits and beliefs. It’s a psychological transformation of mindset, perception and culture of individuals and organizations that how we value efficiency and sustainability. It’s about understanding the purpose that motivates to breathe, live and lead Agile. it’s about becoming a perfect runner which is possible only with discipline and perseverance, instead of picking up a pair of shoes and start running. In a nutshell, Being Agile is a high tempo self-testing culture Doing Agile Doing Agile is to get focused on practices, doing things in a systematic manner, converting principles into practice, and consciousness into the culture, solve problems effectively. It’s about agile on the surface, demonstrating the practices by adopting the principles but not just checking the box once you have completed something and satisfy the management. In a true Agile environment, an organization must do things rightly with courage and honesty. First being agile and then doing Agile leads to an improved ability, visibility and productivity. Organizations can move towards the goal and achieve excellence more quickly, consistently and predictably.

5.1 Right Innovative Mindset Mindset presents intelligence, sensibility and approach. It is the new psychology of success and failure. The mindset is an environment where teams breathe, cultivate, nourish and flourish. Mindset works when it gets lubricated with management revolution and driven by innovative leadership. The right mindset covers people into highperforming teams with astonishing productivity as it determines the targets for improvement. Creeping further closer to the agile mindset exemplifies a great working culture and features of the revolution. Agile support in setting and developing such environment and set of behaviors where customers are also elated with results. Agile is a mindset of professional emergence which promotes selforganizing teams over the boss-driven individuals because it is an attribute of practitioners. Agile mindset is a pragmatic framework and action-oriented more than a theoretical philosophy and can go beyond a set of beliefs. The agile mindset reflects hard-won knowledge of experience and ways of thinking. An agile innovative mindset is an optimal attitude that presents focused improvement, learning cycles and the ability to adapt the change with a tendency of generating amazing results. Agile Mindset is more self-organizing, interactive and adaptive to deliver as it exerts a powerful and massive influence on the behavior of organizational laws. The better mindset, the better execution of a project. Further, it can be a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The fixed mindset is more about intelligence, personality, character, philosophy,

approach and attitude. While, growth mindset is about hard work, learning and training.

5.2 Evolutionary Cultural Alignment Cultural alignment is the real cultural transformation and at the same time, it is the biggest challenge during agile transformations. An agile model is more evolutionary than revolutionary, always embrace a collaborative approach. One of the key personas of an agile approach is autonomy with alignment that eventually builds cultural alignment. Besides many others, organizations are also facing socio-economic challenges during the transformation journey. An agile organization needs high standards of alignment and ecosystem between transparency, proficiency, capability and accountability to operate effectively. Ensure cultural alignment through consistent positive behavior and a high-trust environment because misalignment can easily undermine both performance and health. Such misalignments often happen in strategic shifts. Cultural alignment is rapidly accelerating in global work strategy and global mindset for next-generation businesses. It’s more of a leaderdriven recipe with powerful competitive advantages. The most selfaware organizations have not only looked to the benefits, but they have also considered the failings. Early alignment is very important instead of redesign choices, structures, leadership and management. Becoming a truly Agile Centralized Organization is more evolutionary, along with the right level of alignment across the organization and team to meet the business objectives and goals. In fact, the alignment between cultural diversity and cultural intelligence is the real source of evolutionary cultural alignment.

5.3 Value Proposition Everyone needs to understand the value proposition. Agile work out for you on the ground during the execution time to enhance the value proposition. The in-hand benefits of the value proposition are visibility, smooth project cycle, right delivery to the end-user and the competitive edge by increasing customer value. Value Proposition improves your view on customer needs in a structured way to execute a successful customer value strategy which finally adds value to the business. Value proposition interactive canvas is an independent way out to create product vision, to better understand the customer profile and customer segments associated with the value propositions. As it creates a connection between customer profile and value map, hence on this canvas, you can also place the pains, obstacles and risks which brings dissatisfaction or frustration for the customers. Overall, Agile is more holistic, transformative, enterprise and widely viewed as a value proposition for the organizations as a whole. Focus on the value before your competitors do, as it’s must require to achieve greater Net Present Value (NPV), revenue streams and to cover the cost of goods and overall quality results for greater customer satisfaction. The value proposition of being agile also reduces risk, bridging the gap, generates foster innovation and flexible predictability. Better to define the value statement for the organization as the best champions for value make a profit and also focus on a societal benefit. Customer perspective: Value = Benefits – Costs.

5.4 Highest Impactful Retention For high-level retention, it’s important to draw a balance between speed and knowledge. Better not to spent a major portion of time detailing the solutions and designs, rather things can be fleshed out and supplemented with wireframes, acceptance criteria and the rest produced at the most appropriate developmental stages. Every organization wants business agility which is the ability to respond effectively fast to justify business conditions, objectives and success. Among the multitude of alarming challenges in today’s extremely contemporary and competitive world, to remain efficient, it’s also very significant and challenging to retain the teams and talents (workforce) with required productivity and motivation. Team and knowledge retention is the key to remain relevant in the globally connected technology-driven business market. When one team member decides to leave a company, it often results in a huge blow to morale on the remaining team members. And of course, the cost of replacing midlevel and high-level is quite budget consuming. That is why, the team-building aspect is another closeknitting factor in higher retention levels, as teams in Agile are teams are self-selecting and self-organizing. Attraction and satisfaction are the two most important factors for retention including healthy organizational culture and flexible working environment, work-life balance and ongoing pieces of training that maximize efficiency, productivity and creativity. That is the reason undoubtedly agile transformation has taken the front seat as it has the ability to attract and retain the best people within the business.

5.5 Emotional Commitment Emotional Agility is directly linked with productively, inner experiences, a clear head and open-mindedness. It helps organizations and people to diagnose how their emotional commitment affects their thoughts, actions, and behaviors. On the other hand, negative emotions push organizations away from success, locking into unhealthy patterns leading to poor decisions made for incorrect reasons. Emotions are more helpful when incorporated in balanced fundamental values, thoughts and feelings. The goal of becoming emotionally agile is to be able to sift subjectivity into objectivity and to consider the underlying core values. Every emotional response offers a chance to learn something new along with some valuable growth opportunities. To move on, by denying negative thoughts or feelings, people can help themselves to gain better sense to react to a situation to perform better and productive. As emotional agility helps to reduce stress and to encourage innovation and better performance instead of reactionary emotions. Organizational collective emotional intelligence and commitment is the self-screening and self-evaluation which identifies an organization’s capability insights to control the emotions and feelings of all the stakeholder and business challenges. Organizational emotional commitment also sets the trend to develop better strategies, regulations and work policies. Practicing emotional commitment helps an organization’s brain to measure shortfalls and adapt solutions and the right temperament for

the optimal chance of success.