Cigref has published a report on the results of its working group on « Agile at scale », led by Nathalie Barbier, Director of the agile pole at Renault Digital. Digital technologies are revolutionizing all the company’s activities. Disruptive innovations are multiplying and their rate of appearance and disappearance is accelerating. In this context, companies and public administrations have to face very different challenges depending on their sector of activity.
Typical approaches to management are reaching their limits. This context, combined with a high level of uncertainty, is pushing businesses and public administrations towards Agile organisations that put clients and users at the heart of all their developments.
Agile is a way to adapt more quickly to market needs, identify new sources of performance, deliver more value faster to customers, and attract and retain talent. Agile often allows for a finer control over budgets, which are often falling, while providing users with features that provide more value.
In my view, the « why » of Agile at Scale is that it is a way for companies to be resilient in the face of changes to its market and environment. This explains why tens of thousands of companies have adopted it.
Nathalie Barbier, Director of the Agile unit at Renault Digital and leader of the « Agile at Scale » working group
The present report builds on the previous ones and studies new challenges and concerns that are emerging following several years of implementing Agile at Scale. These can be divided into three areas: the organisation needed to successfully and sustainably implement Agile at Scale throughout the company or administration, measurement in order to track the Agile transformation and drive continuous improvement, and Lean Portfolio Management & Lean Budgeting to allocate budgets to value streams and therefore organise work according to the value provided.
As for the « what », this report is about bringing the focus back to customers and employees while improving efficiency through a set of practices and principles applied throughout the company. These practices and principles, as well as sharing how they are applied, are the subject of our working group.
Nathalie Barbier, Director of the Agile unit at Renault Digital and leader of the « Agile at Scale » working group
On the « how », our working group focused on new practices from the Cigref document « Agile at scale: Implementing agility on a company-wide scale« , released in December 2018, such as value chains and Lean Budgeting as well as complex culture-change topics such as continuous improvement and the culture of measurement, to assess how sustainable are the gains obtained through Agile at Scale.
Nathalie Barbier, Director of the Agile unit at Renault Digital and leader of the « Agile at Scale » working group
Cigref reports on Agile were published in 2003 and 2015, where Agile first concerned projects and then IT. In December 2018, the report « Agile at scale: Implementing agility on a company-wide scale » was published, expanding the thinking on Agile to the enterprise level. It offers concrete keys to unlock or implement Agile at the enterprise level and shares best practices and ideas from the feedback of more than thirty companies contributing to the working group.