Metagility

"Bishop’s Metagility uses a vortex as a means to coordinate parallel product development activities. It’s an exciting new way to think about managing software development in the age of digitalization."

—Richard Baskerville, Regents’ Professor, Georgia State University

“Dr. Bishop’s book offers tremendous value to executives tasked with leading others to improve speed to market. Lessons drawn from careful study of a number of organizations are thoughtfully deployed to create a toolkit that readers can use to develop and leverage agility.  It’s a guide that will make the reader a better leader.”

—Nathan Bennett, Ph.D., Co-author of Riding Shotgun and Academic Advisor to the COO Circle

“Whether your organization is in the midst of an agile transformation or you are looking to become more agile than you already are, this guide clearly shows how to achieve both within today’s most challenging situations.”

—Dr. Neda Barqawi, Founder of Knovalytics and Serial Entrepreneur

“Metagility is a must read for organizations going through an agile transformation. It is full of useful, research-based information that is critical to implementing agile enterprise wide. This is the best guide available for leveraging agile principles across the entire organization to maximize business value.”

—Hank Caughman, Director of US Development, Urjanet

Agile methodologies have become a popular and widely accepted method for managing software development.  However, despite this success, managing agile methods has proven to be a real challenge for most companies, particularly those with complex products such as IoT devices and large development environments.  As such, agile methods are changing.  Many companies have been forced to adopt a hybrid version of agile and waterfall techniques, and this hybrid approach is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception in the industry.

Metagility: Managing Agile Development for Competitive Advantage is the first book to provide a comprehensive approach for managing a new and highly effective breed of agility from the executive level on down.  Based on scientific theory and practitioner research, it is the definitive playbook for those seeking the optimal solution for adapting agile to more complex product development and organizational contexts. This desk reference shows organizations how to manage both agile and waterfall techniques to outperform their competition in industries with very high technological change, turbulent markets, and innovation.

Dr. David A. Bishop is a technology consultant, enterprise architect, researcher, and instructor with over 25 years of experience working with clients such as AT&T, BellSouth, EDS, Delta Airlines, Toshiba, and government agencies.  In addition to this experience, David holds an ABET accredited Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an MBA from DeVry University with a concentration in IT management, and a Doctorate in Business Administration from Georgia State University.  David is CEO and Founder of Agile Worx (http://www.agile-worx.com), a software development firm that provides program and project management tools based on this research.  He is a member and committee chair for the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) based in Geneva Switzerland, a member of ANSI, and a Senior Member of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery.  David is also founding chairman for the Atlanta IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.  

Dr. Bishop is the creator of agile vortex theory which is the result of over five years of intensive practitioner research in some of the world’s most successful organizations. Its focus was to study how these organizations managed both agile and waterfall techniques to outperform their competition in industries with very high technological change, turbulent markets, and innovation.

Part One: The Need for Metagility: Establishing a New Direction for Your Organization

Chapter 1: Agile Methods Today: What Has Changed and Why

Chapter 2: The Problem: Performance and Limitations of Agile Methods

Chapter 3: Hybrid Agility: Determining and Implementing the Right Approach

Part Two: The Agile Business Vortex: Understanding and Managing this New Phenomenon

Chapter 4: Understanding Agile Vortices

Chapter 5: Managing Market Pressure

Chapter 6: Product Genesis: Determining What to Build

Chapter 7: Organizational (Process) Agility: Building the Capability

Part Three: Practical Issues and Applications

Chapter 8: The Art of Meta-Agility: Bringing it All Together

Chapter 9: Soft Skills for Managing Agility

Chapter 10: The Future of Agile Methods

References

Index