Agile IT Organization Design

Aspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organisation. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT Effectiveness” that is as practical as it is valuable.

The author shows how structural, political, operational, and cultural facets of organisation design influence overall IT agility—and how you can promote better collaboration across diverse functions, from sales and marketing to product development, and engineering to IT operations. Through real examples, he helps you evaluate and improve organisation designs that enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the key ingredients for a highly motivated workforce.

You’ll find “close range” coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organisational norms, communication, and culture. For each, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where your organisation stands, and clear direction for making improvements. Ready to optimise the performance of your IT organisation or digital business? Here are practical solutions for the long term, and for right now.

• Govern for value over predictability
• Organise for responsiveness, not lowest cost
• Clarify accountability for outcomes and for decisions along the way
• Strengthen the alignment of autonomous teams
• Move beyond project teams to capability teams
• Break down tool-induced silos
• Choose financial practices that are free of harmful side effects
• Create and retain great teams despite today’s “talent crunch”
• Reform metrics to promote (not prevent) agility
• Evolve culture through improvements to structure, practices, and leadership—and careful, deliberate interventions