The Agility Cycle - Part 1

Continuing the "What is Agility?" series of posts ... we have looked at business agility and how it combines with the "people factor" from the agile manifesto to yield software development agility. So now that we know the meaning of agility, the next two questions  I want to answer are "how do you do it?" and "what does it look like?"

In this posting I will attempt to generally answer the "how do you do it?" question. This is basically a question of process. What is the overall process for "swiftly sensing and rapidly responding to change & uncertainty in close collaboration with stakeholders to create simple, sustainable structures with sufficient flexibility to dynamically adapt & evolve business processes, products & plans."

This process is essentially an overall cycle. Something that you do, and then "rinse, lather & repeat." It is called the Agility Cycle. Let's look at a few different descriptions of this cycle (mostly from the realm of business agility) and then formulate our own for software development agility.

Gartner describes the business agility cycle as:

• Sense the need for change in the environment (includes the proactive initiation of change)
• Strategize the available options and develop alternatives
• Decide which path to take and commit to the approach
• Communicate internally and externally to everyone who needs to know
• Act to produce results and follow-through efficiently

Gartner has a number of reports on agility (some of which are even freely available :). You can read about them all at this summary.

John Boyd describes it as an OODA loop:

• Observe your environment (yourself; your threats and opportunities; the physical, mental, and ethical situation; and potential allies and opponents)
• Orient yourself to grasp what it all means and identify patterns, approaches and likely outcomes
• Decide upon a course of action and tactical plan
• Act on the plan (execute while minding the terrain)

Another source describes it as:

• Scan emerging trends and issues through gathering information and analysis
• Sense opportunities to translate information into actionable solutions
• Respond to opportunities and risks by being sufficiently flexible at tactical and strategic levels
• Shape future environments through driving change.

In Sense, Respond and Learn, Marcel v Oosterhout describes the business-agility cycle as:

• Monitor & Sense: monitor the business environment and sense critical market signals, events, and changing conditions
• Interpret & Evaluate: interpret the information and evaluate if it is something to (re)act to or ignore.
• Decide & Plan: decide which response is best and plan to implement it
• Reconfigure & Adapt: reconfigure or adapt business, operations, or IT capabilities
• Respond & Execute: respond by executing with new or adapted capabilities
• Learn: Record the cycle, learn from previous cycles, share to improve future cycles
• Manage: manage the sense-respond-learn cycle to support completing the process as rapidly and effectively as required

Notice that, as with the definitions of business agility we saw before, there is no explicit mention of the kind of close collaboration and self-organization that is deemed an essential component of software agility. Any attempt we make to derive the software agility cycle from the business agility cycle needs to take into consideration this close collaboration of the participants and emergence of the solution as a result (rather than knowing it all up front).

We'll discuss this next time when we try to describe the software agility cycle.