Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery 1st Edition

Deep. Wide. Credible. Current. All those adjectives apply. In this overview, Sriram Narayan has successfully integrated a wide variety of experience and principle into a comprehensive, Agile-informed discussion of organizational design, particularly in the context of IT delivery. Narayan first briefly covers the key principles of Agile, and then digs deep into core questions of organization design, line/staff issues, project vs. product management, functional silos vs. cross-functional teams, and many other topics currently troubling the IT industry as Agile continues its inexorable march.This is not some magazine article expanded to book length. Each chapter is well crafted and meticulously researched; reading the book took me quite some time as I branched off into his excellent and credible sources. Some high points:- the evolving relationship of planning & execution, and the need for planners to keep some execution responsibilities- how CapEx vs OpEx accounting expectations drive ineffective operating models- "How Email Shapes Us," with reference to McLuhan, original and thought provoking observations- His discussion of microaggressions in Chapter 14 really made me look at my own behavior.Couple questions:- "Functional silos=bad, product team=good" is near dogma in the Agile world. What about the functional team that formalizes its services to the point they are essentially a product team?- Re: internal competition, he's against it and brings in some good citations (e.g. DeMarco's Slack). But what about parallel development and options strategies when trying to establish a product direction? It seems a zero-sum mentality might be hard to overcome. Same with red-team penetration tests & similar drills.But none of these detract from a solid and enthusiastic 5-star rating. Perhaps more to the point, this is the first book among probably the last 30 I've read that inspired me to write a review.

I have 26 years experience leading process improvement transformations and 16 years implementing Agile. This book is great! So many people who write “agile” books or try to teach it focus on the history and the mechanics of scrum, this book goes deeper . I highly recommend to all to deepen your knowledge.d

As a guide to what people are thinking about when they talk about using the software development ethos known as Agile for running an entire IT department, this book is probably as good as it gets. The author has done a very thorough job and his writing is above average for a technical person. But, there are issues with the whole concept of the using Agile for this purpose. One issue is the complete misapplication of the lean notion of takt time, which is about matching a balanced production system's output to customer demand. It is not about constantly being disruptive by pushing change into a customer environment at some arbitrarily fast pace, just to satisfy the needs of a software development discipline. That's just awful - or worse. I really can't rail against that nonsense enough.Another issue with Agile is its modest (at best) focus on metrics that matter. John Doerr's book on this topic would be a good read for anyone struggling to understand this issue. For example, point of sale systems exist to facilitate sales transactions, and possibly integrate with such things as order entry in a restaurant or inventory in a retail store. Thus, establishing a baseline set of metrics for the processes that the customer cares about, setting some target improvement objectives, and then measuring the results of having changed the delivered software to see if the processes have improved in the right direction might be something important to do. Alas, the fundamentally critical aspect of measuring what matters is missing from Agile the same way it was in ITIL and other IT departmental management systems that have wrought their damage and been discarded.So yes, this is a good book to understand the topic. It is probably not a very good road map for running an IT department, which is not to say that it doesn't have a lot of things in it which are useful.

Getting agile to really deliver on its promises requires more than sprinkling some Scrum(tm) trainers on your engineers. This book has the clearest and most applicable advice I've seen on what organizational shifts are needed to make agile really hum, and why.Very accessible and easy to read, but also full of some pretty deep hard-won wisdom on what works and what doesn't.I'll be recommending this to anyone who is looking to really leverage agile processes for their teams or organization.

I really liked this book. Covers a lot of ground from the problems with a project driven approach, to a more outcome driven approach. Addresses organization, staffing, skilling and budgeting.Makes the point that we are moving to a more responsive [agile] world as against the focus of the industrial age efficient [automation] world.Much of this appears obvious after you read the book, but the author, Sriram, really lays it out in a methodical/surgical way.

Clearly one of the best books I have read in the past five years on lean software engineering and agile techniques. This book provides an excellent balance between research results and practical experience. The guidance is not theoretical; it's all very useful.

I'm not totally sure how to rate this book. He basically summarizes many different articles covered throughout the internet. That being said, he seems to be the first the first one to do it.It's a solid book an I agree with easily 75% of it. If you're in the industry you pretty much have to read it. It's NOT an agile transformation cook book.