Agile Principles as a Leadership Value System: How Agile Memes Survive and Thrive in a Corporate IT Culture

What agile approaches are effective to introduce and sustain meaningful change in an IT organization? How can agile approaches be leveraged beyond project work? What processes are involved in introducing agile approaches into an organization, and how might a leader become more agile in adopting agile approaches? DTE Energy´s Information Technology Services (ITS) organization continues to embrace and extend the agile mindset throughout its culture. Our organization first embraced agility eight years ago, and we continue to refine our agile methodologies as we deliver and support world-class business solutions. The more we apply agile methods to our project work, the more we find them to be of value to leadership as well as operational work. In this report we discuss our experiences applying agile methods outside of software development projects in a broader context of operational work and organizational leadership. We assert that agile principals and techniques associated with software development projects can be readily applied in other types of organizational work and in creating and sustaining an effective leadership culture.