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What will Agile bring in 2011?

06 Jan, 2011
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2010 has ended and a new year has begun. 2010 offered us a lot of learning opportunities. It was a good year for the Agile community in the Netherlands and in the world. We saw more and more big corporations embrace Agile methodologies and put serious effort into making it work for them, mostly as a project methodology. ‘Agile adoption’ was THE 2010 word, maybe on par with ‘Wikileak’. So what do we think will be hot in 2011?

We are sure the Agile hot topics for 2011 are:

Agile Management
The managers finally find their place within an agile organization. In 2010 a lot of managers struggled with their position, in 2011 they find their spot. It’s called facilitation island and it smells like paradise and still feels like hard work.
Agile Management Consultancy
The management consultancy world invites itself to the party. The consultancies bring new (project)managementmodels around Agile with them to establish their position in the agile world. This is a mixed blessing: it’s both confusing and useful at the same time. Confusing because Agile is put in models that oppose the Agile values and put more emphasis on process tracking, Big Up Front Plans and management control. Useful as it attracts senior management attention to Agile and help accelarate agile thinking on typical board management topics as Agile strategy implementation, Agile KPI management, Agile risk management, Agile budget control and Agile organization structures.
Agile at Scale
Corporations shift from scaling agile to agile at scale. Instead of using Agile only for projects, agile is implemented at corporate level with a stronger focus on product portfolio management to deliver more value. Senior management gets seriously involved in the prioritisation of what’s really important. The discussion is no longer about prioritizing projects, it’s about what delivers most value to the company in the long run.
Agile Maturity
Many companies start their journey with agile. They seek to learn from the past experiences of those that went before them. Those trailblazers on the other hand are ready for the ‘beyond Agile’. Agile maturity with a focus on the journey from just starting to completely incorporating agile is the subject of many publications and presentations in 2011. Agile maturity is how the different groups share their experiences and learn from each other.
Agile Metrics

Now the use of Agile has become more and more serious, the need for good metrics has become even more real. The Agile world rids itself of its cowboy stigma by creating more transparancy in a way that is useful for everyone in an organization. Putting things on a wall is no longer enough, you can’t expect everybody in a 30,000 people company to visit all the teams daily or even weekly. The big agile adoptions embrace metrics to enable running agile at scale.
Risk Management</dt

Given these other trends risk management becomes more important. The IT risk management so far has been the laughing stock of real risk management. 2011 is the year IT risk management matures and agile leads the way.
Agile Results Only Work Spheres
The Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) or ‘new way of working’ (Dutch: “Het nieuwe werken”) is here and implemented by many corporations. While corporations want the benefits from working with Agile, there is also a strong desire to apply ROWE. An answer is found to combine distributed working and teameffort into a new way of working called: Agile Result Only Work Spheres also known as AROWS.

We wish you all a pleasant 2011 and may it be a MoreAgile year !

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