Book description
Design IT Organizations for Agility at Scale
Aspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organization. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT Effectiveness” that is as practical as it is valuable.
The author shows how structural, political, operational, and cultural facets of organization design influence overall IT agility—and how you can promote better collaboration across diverse functions, from sales and marketing to product development, and engineering to IT operations. Through real examples, he helps you evaluate and improve organization designs that enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the key ingredients for a highly motivated workforce.
You’ll find “close range” coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organizational norms, communication, and culture. For each, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where your organization stands, and clear direction for making improvements. Ready to optimize the performance of your IT organization or digital business? Here are practical solutions for the long term, and for right now.
Govern for value over predictability
Organize for responsiveness, not lowest cost
Clarify accountability for outcomes and for decisions along the way
Strengthen the alignment of autonomous teams
Move beyond project teams to capability teams
Break down tool-induced silos
Choose financial practices that are free of harmful side effects
Create and retain great teams despite today’s “talent crunch”
Reform metrics to promote (not prevent) agility
Evolve culture through improvements to structure, practices, and leadership—and careful, deliberate interventions
Table of contents
- About This eBook
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Praise for Agile IT Organization Design
- Dedication Page
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Glossary
- Chapter 1. Context
- Chapter 2. The Agile Credo
- Chapter 3. Key Themes
- Chapter 4. Superstructure
-
Chapter 5. Team Design
- 5.1 Framing the Problem
- 5.2 Activity-oriented Teams
- 5.3 Shared Services
- 5.4 Cross-functional Teams
- 5.5 Cross-functionality in Other Domains
- 5.6 Migrating to Cross-functional Teams
- 5.7 Communities of Practice
- 5.8 Maintenance Teams
- 5.9 Outsourcing
-
5.10 The Matrix: Solve It or Dissolve It
- 5.10.1 Matrix of Shared Services
- 5.10.2 Matrix with Dedicated Capacity and Fungible People
- 5.10.3 Matrix with Dedicated Capacity and People
- 5.10.4 Monolithic Cross-functional Product Team
- 5.10.5 Cross-functional Setup with Activity-oriented Subteams
- 5.10.6 Cross-functional Setup with Outcome-oriented Subteams
- 5.11 Summary of Insights
- 5.12 Summary of Actions
- Chapter 6. Accountability
- Chapter 7. Alignment
-
Chapter 8. Projects
- 8.1 What Is Wrong with Plan-driven Software Projects?
- 8.2 Budget for Capacity, Not for Projects
- 8.3 Business-capability-centric IT
- 8.4 Project Business Cases
- 8.5 Value-driven Projects
- 8.6 Project Managers
- 8.7 Governance
- 8.8 Change Programs and Initiatives
- 8.9 Summary of Insights
- 8.10 Summary of Actions
- Chapter 9. Finance
- Chapter 10. Staffing
- Chapter 11. Tooling
- Chapter 12. Metrics
- Chapter 13. Norms
-
Chapter 14. Communications
- 14.1 Intrinsic Motivation
- 14.2 Interpersonal Communications: Problems
- 14.3 Interpersonal Communications: Mitigation
- 14.4 Scaling Employee Engagement through Internal Communications
- 14.5 Deliberating in Writing
- 14.6 The Use and Misuse of Visual Aids
- 14.7 Documents, Reports, and Templates
- 14.8 Summary of Insights
- 14.9 Summary of Actions
- Chapter 15. The Office
- Chapter 16. Wrap-up
- Bibliography
- Index
Product information
- Title: Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery
- Author(s):
- Release date: June 2015
- Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
- ISBN: 9780133903690
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