Managing the Transition to Agile Product Development ----Lessons from Cisco Systems
Roger B. Chen, Ramya Ravichandar, D Proctor · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2015
In today’s uncertain and fast changing markets, many companies adopted customer centric innovation approaches. Following this, growing number of companies, especially those in software related industries, adopted agile development method to develop new business or products. Prior writings have analyzed the characteristics of this development method and the challenges associated with adopting of the agile practice. So far, most authors focus on micro, engineering team levels, they analyze the composition, team size and working process of agile engineering teams. Very few analyze agile development method from management practices’ perspectives, not many writings examine the management challenges resulted from companies’ transition to agile method and to solutions to these management challenges. Through an in-depth case study on Cisco Systems, we find that companies face two broad challenges to cope with the transition to agile development method. The first is to identify and help business groups and engineering teams to change to agile method, the second is to develop new management practices to implement agile development practices. In this paper, we explain how Cisco Systems addresses these two challenges. More specifically, we explain Cisco’s approach in helping its business groups and engineering teams to adopt agile development method, its new management practices in leadership, planning and coordination etc. to support the implementation of agile development method. We also discuss the broad implications of adopting agile development method on small companies and on important management practices such as globalization.