Author: Mario Aiello

Hi, I’m Mario – a retired agility warrior from a major Swiss bank, beyond agile explorer, lean thinker, former rugby player, and wishful golfer. What frustrates me most? Poor agile adoption, illusionary scaling, and the lack of true business agility. I believe agility should fit purpose, context, and practice – and continuously evolve. Active in the agile space since 2008, my consulting journey began in 2012, helping a digital identity unit adopt Scrum at team level. That work led to the design of an Agile Operating System for the entire organization. Today, as an independent consultant, I help organizations unlock sustainable agility – guided by adaptive intelligence: sensing challenges, learning fast, and adapting with purpose.

Beyond agile

This approach is about leveraging ideas from methodologies originally developed for manufacturing applied to knowledge work: Lean is about efficiency, Flow is about optimisation, and Theory of Constraints about improvement.

Agile is an empty box

Agile has lost its soul. The soul lingers about finding a new home.

Leadership challenges in achieving agility

From an agile perspective, the leadership challenge facing the organization is not necessarily to become agile themselves, but rather to comprehend the principles of agility and provide support for its implementation.

Pursuing objectives

Usually in a business profit maximizing world, chasing (business) objectives is part of a plan: deliver more, faster, and cheaper, … please be more productive!

Bringing agile to the organization

An attempt to a systemic approach for an organization’s successful implementation of agile, leading to new ways of working and a cultural change.

The wheel of agility

It all starts with a need that must be satisfied, a problem that needs solving. So there’s a demand for value that is to be released for consumption.

Sense-making agile

In general, when organizations turn to agile, they’ll pick a method and follow it to (hopefully) understand agile. This is somehow not appropriate as it ignores the fundamentals of why we are opting for agile as well as the operational context of the organization.

Agile approach for release constrained teams

It is common in larger traditional organizations that product and/or service delivery is managed through delivery life cycles (DLC). The release is a constraint imposed upon the delivery system. Agility can be brought into the delivery system through decoupling the release outcome into objectives and focus areas while following simple fundamentals.

Implementing simple agility

I have previously explained Simple Agility and now would like to expand a little about how teams can use these concepts to change their ways of working or just improve the way they work.

Minimum suitable ecosystem for agility

Whatever the intent of an organization when it decides to transition towards agility, its ecosystem needs to be adapted for purpose. Just adopting agile practices without attending to the context and how these interact and impact the ways of working will fail to provide the expected results for the investment on agile.

Having a work acceptance system is important for business agility.

The work intake or acceptance system refers to a well-defined method by which the work is taken over by the technology. It is the bridge between the group of stakeholders defining what to work on and the technology group that will build it.

Explaining simple agility

In most agile implementations I’ve been involved with, the following sequence is the most evident one “chose methodology – train/follow by the book – check for agility”, a typical push approach by which it is quite difficult to make sense as it is not necessarily suited to the organization’s operational reality.

How about business agility?

In an organization’s pursue of business agility, new ways of working must be adapted to the purpose, the context, and the practices within the organization.

The good, the bad, the ugly – Part 2

The latest years as agility consultant and coach I came across some other particular cases which I have approached through the same lens as the cases in my previous post of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Simple agility

Simple agility is based on the understanding of some basic agility fundamentals and easing these into the team/organization ways of working. Making sense out of these fundamentals is the key to durable agility.

It’s not about doing agile but about achieving business agility

Many corporations do agile in a localized manner, in general at the team level, however agility applies across the entire organization, and beyond the boundaries of IT.

Drivers of business agility

Business agility is best achieved through effectiveness, predictability, efficiency, and adaptability

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.

Wishful lies

SCENARIO

The organization has adopted new ways of working

Management needs info in order to commit, outwards and upwards.

The inevitable chain of guesses begins – time, scope and cost commitments.

Popularizing agility

If I was asked to simplify agility concepts to make sure absolute beginners (including detractors) could buy into the organization’s new ways of working, I would first avoid using the word agile (and lean too).