Recently I’ve read an article in German Computer Woche which was titled ‘Are ERP systems too slow for business?’. It is about complex ERP systems that are not able to adopt to the fast changing business needs. There was one interesting word by an Ernst & Young partner I had never heard before: Agile Enterprise.
As we do agile software development for our customers I was curious what agile enterprise means. So I asked Google and read some articles about it. A good definition can be found at the Business Dictionary:
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In the environment of the agile method „Scrum“ I would like to contemplate more closely one important aspect of the project management: The composition of the project team. In the conventional project management this is one of the basic tasks of the project manager. The ideal case is that he can assemble his project team on his own and that he can change the composition during the ongoing project. In the real daily routine he naturally is subject to many external conditions, like for example a limited choice of potential team members or competition through other projects and budget limits. However this does not affect that the project manager should have this authority. (read more…)
Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is an important issue for most enterprises, not only the big ones. But its implementation still bears a lot of risks and the results are often way beyond the initial expectations.
Dr. Ingo Schrewe from incowia GmbH and I wrote an article how agility can help to reduce risk and optimise the results when implementing an EAM. The article was published within the scope of an EAM online special by SIGS-DATACOM and can be downloaded here: http://www.sigs.de/publications/os/2010/EAM/friedrichsen_schrewe_OS_EAM_10.pdf (available in german language only)
Ingo Schrewe and I plan to continue this article by writing some more articles that provide practical guidelines, hints and examples how to establish an agile EAM … whenever we will find the time to write those articles … 
What is the common story that you usually hear about agility? Yes, most of the times it is something like this: Agility was invented by a bunch of frustrated developers who had enough of big, big processes that did not work out and dozens of artefacts that did not deliver to the final product at all. They fought all those evil V-models, RUPs and however those cumbersome process monsters were named by inventing some nice, lean and agile principles they called Scrum, XP and so on. And since then they kept on with their heroic fight to free the developers from their 800 pound process burden and to carry agility into those centres of backwardness, i.e. the management and the business departments to make the developers lives worth living again. That’s sort of the story you know, isn’t it?
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Software projects that are developed based on agile processes like Scrum or eXtreme Programming are very demanding concerning the skills of the developers in an agile team.
In 2001 Andrew Hunt and David Thomas introduced a benchmark for modern developers with their book „The Pragmatic Programmer“. The focus of their work is on practises, tools and design-paradigms to help programmers produce better code.
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From my last vacation in Norway I have brought a postcard with the reputed “Viking Laws”. I have posted it on my monitor to be remembered. 
These days I concentrate myself on learning about agility and I recognized a lot of similarities between agility and the Vikings Law.
Has it been their secret of being able to reach America a long time before Columbus? Let` s have a look…
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