Systemic issues of unethical business practices?

Is there an opportunity for embedding an Agile approach into IT Professional Services Leadership practices to enable quality & profitable outcomes as SME's scale?

• What's your view on embedding an Agile Leadership approach into IT Professional Services practices to enable rapidly growing SME (100 to 1000 person) organizations with the appropriate structure and control over quality & profitable outcomes as they scale? I believe that current 'Best Practice' is often over-engineered and too onerous for the growing business, which prevents timely adoption and implementation, leading to service scalability issues.

• Answer:

  Yes, absolutely ... and I'm personally seeing a dramatic increase in the adoption of Agile practices in SME's. I would estimate that about 2/3 of my customers prior to 2010 were from large enterprises and only 1/3 of my customers were from Small-Medium sized customers. Starting around 2010 that changed quite dramatically and now (April, 2011) about 2/3 of my customers are now SME. In general, these customers are very aggressive using Agile for everything from marketing, sales, right the way through to delivering software. About half are Professional Service consultancies, but there are also a wide variety of product companies too. The PS consultancies are growing very, very rapidly in the order of high double digit growth. It's too early to see how the product companies develop but I would expect that we should start seeing growth in this space over the next two years. Some of the biggest benefits that Agile practices bring to the PS leadership space are (in my opinion): The Definition of Done. This is really a discussion about quality of product or service, and establishes an minimum quality bar for the organization. And, The single prioritized backlog of work. This provides real focus to the business and although it takes considerable disciple to achieve the benefits are significant. Transparency. It's hard to describe how transparency greatly improves communication and efficiency within a company ... it's interesting to see information that was know to only a few become common knowledge throughout. This is a significant (and potentially very difficult) change for many companies. Finally, I'm seeing this in my local market of Australia/New Zealand. This may not be a global trend, and conditions in your market may be very different. Hope that helps.