Agility: A Key Factor For
Business Transformation
Anand Ghatnekar
Sr. Director, CTD-Data Protection Group
& GM – Pune Center, EMC India COE
In the recent past, I have observed that many large scale
enterprises are trying to embrace agile methodologies in software
engineering although Agile as a software engineering practice has
been there for more than a decade now. Going ‘Agile’ has become
increasingly relevant and is infact, considered a game changer in
today’s IT landscape. However, on the other hand, many
organizations are yet to adapt to this change. The reasons are
multi-fold, but in my view, one of the foremost reasons could be
the ‘resistance by the people of the organization’ in implementing
this change. While some believe that this change is for good, a
significant many are not yet convinced about the merits of going
Agile. An understanding of the key drivers of the concepts of Agile
Software Development is imperative to developing an agile
mindset.
Most successful companies have one thing in common: a highly
developed capacity to adapt their business to change. This is very
true in today’s changing environment where we are experiencing a
lot of disruption in technologies in the market place. The digital
era has ushered in a new set of challenges and opportunities and
is changing the way the products and services are consumed by
the customers.
This is catalyzing a whole new breed of solutions and services
based models that demand a competitive and performance edge
in and across the business domains. Agility enables companies to
maintain their performance edge even in the face of significant
business change in their competitive environments.
Agility is all about changing our ‘Mindset’. It’s about speed and
how we engage to solve the business drivers in a better way!
In order to better understand what Agile really means, I would like
to draw your attention with some of the fundamental aspects of
Agility.
 Culture – I would define it as what we do to succeed! It’s the
‘personality’ of an organization. Active support from the top
management is very vital for building agile culture in an
organization. Integrating frugal innovation into the fabric of
your organization helps to cultivate the right agile culture.
Finally as I indicated earlier it’s all about the mindset, having a
‘growth mindset’ vs. a ‘fixed mindset’ play an important role as
well.
 Speed – In this era of rapid technology evolution, it is not the
biggest who survives but it is the fastest! Delivering as fast as
possible – sense of urgency, multi-tasking ability and
responding to change are some of the important ones. Rigid
and time consuming product development processes are agility
inhibitors. Short iterative cycles of product development help
to create working software with customer feedback that can be
included in the next iteration. It is critical to break down
organizational silos to gain speed.
 Structure – We all have seen and experienced both hierarchical
and flat structured organizations and the pros and cons of it. It
is worth understanding what will the organization of the future
look like? The presence of networked structures is an important
part of Agile. These networks go beyond the boundaries of the
geographically dispersed global organizations to effectively
and intensively collaborate with diversified customers and
workforce. Crowdsourcing is a good example of a networked
structure and how the IT industry is leveraging it.
 Process – The best way to understand Agile processes is to
understand the ‘Agile manifesto’. There are various agile
methods and practices including some of the commonly used
such as Scrum, Kanban, FDD, TDD by the agile communities in
software development. While the agile processes can be
followed and implemented it is important to embrace the Agile
principles to be successful in achieving the best results in
transforming your business.
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