Don’t Let Governance Threaten Your Agile Transformation

A O'CALLAGHAN • March 24, 2017

Governance seems to be one of those frightening words that threatens to stop an Agile transformation effort dead in its tracks. I’ve been hearing it whispered, and even screamed once or twice, quite a lot recently. There’s no big surprise here. As the big corporations and Government agencies get increasingly fascinated by frameworks like Scrum, they are mandating their IT departments to “Go agile” and then, sooner or later…governance!

Types of Governance

There is operational governance represented in the defined processes that organizations and teams are expected to follow when software is in production. There is project management governance, perhaps dictated by PRINCE2 or similar, while the product is in development. PRINCE, by the way, is an acronym standing for ‘PRojects In a Controlled Environment’.

Project management governance is often a subset of a wider IT governance. According to the TOGAF version 9.1 , IT governance supposedly provides the framework and structure that links IT resources and information to enterprise goals and strategies. “IT governance institutionalizes best practices for planning, acquiring, implementing and monitoring IT performance…” Standards like COBIT, which stands for Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology, might be in place. And then, of course, there is a range of issues to do with compliance to the requirements of external regulators in all public bodies, as well as commercial institutions in sectors such as insurance and banking. So, is this a case of an irresistible force (Agile) meeting an unmovable object (governance)?

Published on 23/3/17 on Learning Tree page.

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