ALMA - Agile Lifecycle Management Anatomy

So, I will try to collect and present what has been written by me here on the blog and elsewhere on how to achieve organizational agility by practicing agile life-cycle management of services and products. An agile organization is like a fit body, and here is a description of its anatomy.

The anatomy points at a structure. There are certain functions you need to have in place in order to make the body move, and it might be that your current organization need to adjust a bit in order to make it work, but it is not an organizational chart per se. You can make it work in a lot of different organizational structures.

The anatomy is founded on a certain set of lean and agile values and principles. Body structure is one thing, it is how you decide to move the body that will make it fit. And decisions on action comes from what you, as a group, value and what guiding principles you are used to.

Organizational agility has during history been improved in lots of environments, using many different techniques. Some of the techniques are very domain specific, such as extreme reducing of variation in a manufacturing environment, while others, such as self organized teams, can be applied almost anywhere. Agile life-cycle management is therefore not one single set of techniques, but rather a toolbox, used within a context of agile thinking around value, service, and product. The anatomy and the values and principles gives the people guidance on when and where one should use a particular tool.

I would like to describe how to make this work, and I hope that you can find guidance on how to transform a bit of your world into becoming more agile.