Design IT Organizations for Agility at Scale

Aspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organization. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT Effectiveness” that is as practical as it is valuable.

The author shows how structural, political, operational, and cultural facets of organization design influence overall IT agility—and how you can promote better collaboration across diverse functions, from sales and marketing to product development, and engineering to IT operations. Through real examples, he helps you evaluate and improve organization designs that enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the key ingredients for a highly motivated workforce.

You’ll find “close range” coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organizational norms, communication, and culture. For each, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where your organization stands, and clear direction for making improvements. Ready to optimize the performance of your IT organization or digital business? Here are practical solutions for the long term, and for right now.

• Govern for value over predictability
• Organize for responsiveness, not lowest cost
• Clarify accountability for outcomes and for decisions along the way
• Strengthen the alignment of autonomous teams
• Move beyond project teams to capability teams
• Break down tool-induced silos
• Choose financial practices that are free of harmful side effects
• Create and retain great teams despite today’s “talent crunch”
• Reform metrics to promote (not prevent) agility
• Evolve culture through improvements to structure, practices, and leadership—and careful, deliberate interventions

Sriram Narayan, an IT management consultant with ThoughtWorks, has provided IT agility guidance to clients in telecom, financial services, energy, retail, and internet businesses. He has also served as a leadership coach and a director of innovation. He was a founding member of the ThoughtWorks technology advisory board—the group that now authors the tech radar. During a two-year stint at the products division of ThoughtWorks, he helped with product innovation and advocacy on Go, a tool that helps with continuous delivery.