In the book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change, Bob Lewis and co-author Dave Kaiser analyzed and discussed the new ways of thinking about IT and business management.

These are some of my takeaways from reading the book.

In the “Fixing Agile” chapter, Bob and Dave discussed the advantages and challenges for adapting the Agile methodology for building our IT solutions.

The best way to adopt Agile is to treat it as a mindset rather than simply a set of techniques. Practicing Agile requires us to establish and maintain a direct and iterative developer-to-user interaction. Delivering incremental deliverables and tangible results will further increase Agile’s chance for success.

The bigger the change, the higher the chance of something will not go as planned. Most multiyear projects fail in part due to their complexity. The incremental approach of Agile can help us make better planning decisions for the larger business change we hope to undertake.

Agile may be defined as a software product delivery methodology, but we can leverage Agile to do more. If there is no such thing as an IT project and only intentional business change, we should find ways to adapt Agile for facilitating business changes. Enhancing Agile for such effort will involve delivering business change in tandem with COTS/SaaS implementations as well as synchronizing Agile with strategic planning.

So, what can be done to address the agile adoption challenges? Fortunately, Bob and Dave have some solid suggestions laid out at the end of Chapter Three. I highly recommend the book.

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