The north star

High tech companies, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, are revered for their ability to produce high quality, customer-centric software products at pace. This is what the Agile Industry is supposed to be targeting, however there is more to being a modern software delivery company than rolling out Scrum, or sending round a few books.

Is Agile even suitable for your environment? There are other methods available that may be more appropriate.

The diagram above pulls out just some of the many activities and approaches that you might find at these respected companies. This is neither an exhaustive list, nor an exclusive list, merely an indication of the many types of activities that might help a company attain this goal for themselves. This list is bigger than just Agile.

There are so many overlapping categorises. Where in this landscape does Agile begin and end? Agile borrows from Lean, so where does that fit in. DevOps borrows from Lean and overlaps with Agile. Then there's DevSecOps, Product Thinking, UX, Lean Startup, Cloud-native, Modern Engineering Practices, Platform Engineering, SRE, etc, etc..

It's fair to say there's a lot.

...and your starting point will be different too. In our experience the target state, the North Star, is necessarily different in each case. Each borrows elements from the categories above but which, and when, is nuanced.

You will need to define, agree and socialise yours... loosely, of course. You will learn as you go.

This target state, isn't a destination. It's your North Star. You won't get there. It will change over time. Keep iterating it.

But it's valuable to have it, and keep it in mind, to drive the choices you make.