Agile has shown its value by transforming the way development is done, but to see the full benefits that Agile can bring, it needs to expand beyond the development teams and be adopted across the whole enterprise. This is Enterprise Agility.

Why a patterns based approach?

Back a few years, when things were still made by hand, a craftsman who wanted to make a set of things that were the same each time would make one reference piece, measured and constructed very accurately, and use it to create more pieces that looked the same. That reference piece would be carefully labelled with instructions on which way to align wood grains (or whatever was appropriate) and which techniques to use to construct it. This reference piece was called a pattern. There was even a specialised skill within workshops called patternmaker, with its own set of specialised (and very accurate) tools. So a pattern is a template or a guide to doing something. It's a way to reliably and consistently make copies of something.

So how does this apply to Enterprise Agility? Another way to look at patterns is as a recipe for solving common problems. The design patterns movement within software development uses patterns this way. Each of the design patterns is a standard, proven way to solve common design problems within software projects.

There are a number of problems that software projects encounter all the time and a series of design patterns have been developed to address them - MVC, Factory, Inversion... and so on. That's not to say that software development is now just a matter of following the patterns. Patterns help with the bits that are common across many implementations. The bits that are specific to the problem that you are solving... those you still need to work out for yourself.

It's the same with Agile adoption into a large organisation. When we start applying agile into a larger organisation, we hit a number of common problems. Organisational inertia, frozen middle management, command and control thinking, non-agile org structures and so on. At the moment though, we are all trying to solve these problems ourselves. Each of us who is involved in Enterprise Agility are spending a lot of time and effort solving problems that others have already solved. 

Through years of coaching Enterprise Agility, the authors have come to recognise a set of common problems faced when moving towards Enterprise Agility and in this book we present a set of patterns for identifying and solving them.