Dancing with the Agile Goddess
Dancing with the Agile Bitch Goddess
Israel Gat, BMC Software
According to a recent study by the Cutter Consortium and QSM Associates, BMC’s Distributed System Management (DSM) business unit achieved delivery times of four to five months on projects that would normally take one year. Impressive and gratifying that these “production” results are to hundreds of employees in the business unit, implementing Agile is not “just” a business unit process. As the leader of this unit, I present an end-to-end view of BMC’s experience implementing Agile from an end-to-end corporate perspective – the pitfalls we encountered and how we overcame them. Specifically, effects of successful Agile implementation in R&D on Marketing, Sales, Software Consultants, Professional Services and Customer Support are interpreted as inevitable consequences of introducing a disruptive methodology.
At BMC, we developed a set of processes to mitigate methodical disruption and facilitate alignment across corporate functions. In particular, Agile-Based-Market-of-One design is showing promise as the antidote to the innate corporate drive to “harness” disruptions. Furthermore, this design is a most meaningful form of Agile from a customer value standpoint. While tricky to implement, the design is quite promising for organizations that mastered the traditional R&D aspects of Agile.