Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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The right governance processes are essential for business agility. Organisations wanting business agility without taking on board and implementing appropriate governance methods are likely to fail to achieve the benefits that business agility can bring.

In this post I'll conclude the mini-series on business agility by addressing the governance needs of business agility, both at the executive level and at the programme management office (PMO) level.

Executive-Level Governance

The senior management team / executives have to take ultimate ownership and responsibility for business agility because:

• The change programmes that underpin business agility need executive level sponsors
• The executive team needs to prioritise the prospective changes as they are the appropriate group to evaluate business priorities and likely business value
• They own the business strategy that is the starting point for the business priorities

The team (or a sub-committee of) need to meet regularly to prioritise the set of change projects and change proposals that have been tabled for the next round of change. It is important that the frequency of the prioritisation meetings matches the speed of reaction needed to take advantage of opportunities that arise (or that there is a process for getting a rapid re-evaluation is an urgent opportunity arises).

Organisations using Agile (as recommended in the last post) often use these methods to prioritise the next sprints for major programmes.

PMO-Level Governance

The PMO's governance processes support the executive-level governance and manage the change projects:

• Translating the priorities set by the executive team into action on the business change projects
• Reporting on progress
• Being accountable for value realisation

These governance processes need to "fit" with the development processes being used. Where Agile methods are used, some have found this to be challenging, but there are approaches to providing suitable governance.

In addition to the above, the PMO needs to manage the skill set and capabilities for the current and probable future change projects, and more broadly for the needs of business agility. This is likely need to include customer insight, software competency and business analytics.

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I hope you've found this blog post series useful. Any questions or comments?