There is an exciting shift in the Project Management world from focussing on teams to moving our attention to the Enterprise.  I am very excited about this because over time as a Project Manager you realise that you can arm yourself with skills, knowledge, certification and techniques and you can lead your teams and equip them with knowledge and freedom to work in a focussed and directed way and still hit obstacles that invariably lead back to the organisation. Both Prince2 and Agile practitioners are starting to think about how to address the organisational issues and how to scale methodologies to the enterprise.

Last week at Valtech’s Agile Edge conference Al Goerner gave a terrific key note session on Adapting Agile to the Enterprise.  In explaining the maturing of Agile practice he outlined the two generations of Agile:

1st Generation - Agile for the team

• Emphasising the Human Factors in development
• Emphasising Empowerment-to-a-goal
• A Gaggle of Gurus
• Naive Agile and Faux Agile

2nd Generation - Agile for the Enterprise

• Emphasising Risk Management
• Emphasising Backlog Management
• Emphasising Visibility and Accountability
• Emphasising the Whole Solution Value Stream

The 2nd Generation of Agile practices really resonates with me and I’m sure resonates with any Project Manager who has worked in large organisations. How many of us have wrangled with the 1st Generation  ’Gaggle of Gurus’? I certainly have!

Managing risk and providing visibility and accountability is so important in the enterprise and I’m completely inspired by Al Goerner’s presentation on exactly these issues. His most important point was that Agile doesn’t mean not focussing on these things and it doesn’t mean not producing documentation and certain other claims made by the 1st Generation-ers. The key thing is to only do things that have a point, that will be read, and not just as a formality or because they’re ‘required’.

Beam me up Scotty!