Releasing Software as an Organizational Change Process
The key hypothesis of Agile Congruence is the relationship between releasing software and the Nadler-Tushman model. Enterprise software is the automation of an organization’s formal processes. Each time an organization releases software, it changes the “work” component of the organization in the Nadler-Tushman model. With each software release the people, culture, and org structure components must then be evaluated and possibly updated to keep congruence in the organization. This means that the working software output of the agile software development model is a change in the work component of The Nadler-Tushman model. Under an Agile software development methodology, these changes are made frequently. At the company where I spent the majority of my career we released software every two weeks. In order to maintain congruence every two weeks we needed to evaluate the impact of the released software on the people, culture, and organizational structure components of our business. While this seems daunting it results in a series of small incremental changes and it is far easier to implement than the alternative of making large organizational changes every six months to a year. ...