The main problem of business agility

AN IDENTIFIED PROBLEM

The business and IT are not quite synced, a certain gap or dysfunction between them: one does not like change the other thrives in uncertainty. They do not speak the same lingo nor they try to understand each other.

A POSSIBLE SOLUTION

How about if a dialog is attempted, attending to the communication between both sides via a double loop of needs and outcomes:

  • the business expresses their needs in a clear way so IT can understand and deliver value against these: needs are fulfilled through dialog, ownership and commitment.
  • IT, upon understanding the business needs, expresses their own needs to the business in order to deliver value: needs are fulfilled via clarification, facilitation and feedback.

IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION

What links the business and IT is the value stream, both are integral parts, hence breaking down the double loop of needs and outcomes into elements of the value stream (i.e. portfolio, product, devops, release) would facilitate the communication between the parts as these become responsible of a smaller part of the business value:

  • portfolio responsible for the business backlog,
  • product responsible for the product backlogs,
  • devops responsible for building and delivering value increments,
  • release responsible for bundling value and making it available to the market.

THE RESULT

We get a series of double loops between portfolio and product, between product and devops, between devops and release, and so on. This enables communication and understanding among adjacent parts of the value stream.

Hence we bridge the gap between Business and IT through the value stream.

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Author: Mario Aiello

Hi, I’m Mario – retired agility warrior from a major Swiss bank, beyond agile explorer, lean thinker, former rugby player, and wishful golfer. I’ve been in the agile space since 2008. I began consulting in 2012 with a Scrum adoption in a digital identity unit — and that path eventually led me to design an Agile Operating System at organisational scale. What pushed me further was frustration: poor adoption, illusionary scaling, and “agile” that looks busy but doesn’t improve business outcomes. That’s why I developed the Adaptive Fitness System (AFS) — an approach that treats agility as fitness for change: fit for purpose, fit for context, fit for execution, and fit for continuous improvement. Today, I use AFS to help organisations sense what’s real, learn fast, and adapt with intent.