TURNING COMPLEXITY INTO VALUE

Business Agility is a key objective for many organizations, regardless of their industry and markets, and we can say the same for Antifragility. To achieve such objectives, the development of an Agile mindset, along with an adequate set of contextualized practices, is surely the best course of action that an organization should consider and experiment with.

It is important to avoid the trap of considering Agile useful only for software development. Despite the common belief, the roots of Agile are in non-software companies, as highlighted in 1986 Harvard paper "The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka.

In relation to these premises, AgileConstellation was born, an open-agora to collect the experiences of declination of Agile and Lean in contexts characterized by products and solutions that impact multiple disciplines and specific engineering domains.

The goal is to overcome typical problems of parallel development that are integrated only at the end of development, so called Big Bang Integration. This type of integration generates several critical problems:

• development efficiency is heavily penalized, as teams do not continually communicate between them, do not share know-how, nor strength or weakness elements.
• problems emerge only late in the development cycle, where fixing has high costs, especially for hardware components.
• the resulting solution is, often, a low-quality compromise, driven by time constraints suffering from workarounds where components do not integrate perfectly.

The actula Agile Constellation domains are just a few influenced by Business Agility today. Business Agility impacts more than processes or frameworks, it changes the concept of flexibility and enhances organizational survival abilities.It is crucial to emphasize that there is no single path towards Business Agility: it is a journey and the first step is the most difficult to take.