Aligning strategic planning with agile development: extending agile thinking to business improvement

Abstract

Many development teams have successfully used agile development to build quality software, but often these projects have failed to effectively contribute to overall company success. Our feeling is that this failure is due to the fact that most companies' strategic planning processes have not been aligned to take advantage of the flexibility and adaptability of agile development. We strongly believe in the power of agile development; however we feel that this alone is insufficient to make every software project successful. Projects must be coupled with a complimentary approach to strategy to in order to achieve the overall business goals. If agile development is to continue growing in the business community, complimentary strategic planning capabilities must be developed that share the same agile philosophies.