Eric Garton of Bain & Company talks about the adoption of agile methodologies by senior teams in organizations.
Treat your enterprise priorities as a managed backlog. At the enterprise level, think of all of your corporate initiatives as a backlog, just like software developers think of future product features as a backlog. See your leadership team as an agile Scrum that prioritizes the backlog based on importance, then tackles them in sequence until completed. Reprioritize your enterprise backlog when new initiatives are added. This helps maintain focus and velocity while stopping initiative proliferation. Systematic Inc., a 525-employee software company, began applying agile methodologies in 2005. As they spread to all its software development teams, Michael Holm, the company’s CEO and cofounder, began to worry that his leadership team was hindering progress. So in 2010, Holm decided to run his nine-member executive group as an agile team. The group started by meeting every Monday for an hour or two, but found the pace of decision making too slow. So it began having daily 20-minute stand-ups at 8:40 a.m. to discuss what members had done the day before, what they would do that day, and where they needed help.
This is supported and envigorated by turning many decisions unto rapid velocity test and learn iterations where decisions are made by experiential learning rather than death by committee discussions.