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Agile IT organization design : for digital transformation and continuous delivery
Narayan S., Addison-Wesley Professional, Old Tappan, NJ, 2015. 304 pp. Type: Book (978-0-133903-35-5)
Date Reviewed: Nov 24 2015

Continuous delivery is often viewed from a technical side. Instead, Narayan addresses it from an organizational and business side. He focuses on agile organization design. The book considers the 12 principles of agile and examines information technology (IT) in a business and organizational framework. Information on agile can be found online (http://agilemanifesto.org/).

The book is written for IT managers, folks managing IT managers, and technicians who are seriously considering a move into IT management. It is a management text; it’s neither a technical read nor a project management text. Rather, it speaks to organizing and building an efficient and collaborative IT organization. It’s very much about digital transformation within large enterprises, and considers strategy alignment, project portfolios, IT staffing, financing, and budgets. The reader is expected to have a good understanding of IT organizations and large-scale IT projects in order to grasp the subtleties presented. It’s a text for serious managers who want to increase the value of IT in the organization.

The book is divided into 16 chapters. It begins with chapters on context, the agile credo, and key themes, with a focus on value and responsiveness as opposed to predictability and cost-efficiency. The meat of the book begins with chapters on structure, team design, accountability, and strategy alignment. The chapter on structure considers business activities and outcomes, centralization/decentralization, and silos. The chapter on team design considers activity centered versus cross-functional versus maintenance teams versus outsourcing. The alignment chapter considers strategy and business alignment with IT.

The next set of chapters weighs in on project governance, with a focus on business-centered IT and cost-center thinking versus profit-center thinking, including CapEx and chargebacks. Staffing and tooling in an unscripted collaboration is considered. Metric development and the weaknesses of dashboards are presented. There is a focus on developing better metrics.

The last few chapters focus on culture in an IT group. One considers challenging the operating norms, addressing internal competition and IT policy. A well-presented chapter on communications, including documents and reports, is included. A short chapter on office layouts and ergonomics is presented. The last chapter, “Wrap-Up,” provides an outline of the book, presented as a taxonomy.

A suggestion: after reading the first three chapters, read the wrap-up chapter before reading the remaining chapters. It will help organize your thoughts and will point you to previous readings as you progress. The bibliography is quite good. Serious managers will benefit from the book.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Robert M. Lynch Review #: CR143972 (1602-0107)
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