A guide to navigating the messiness of software development process change, dealing with all the legacy organizational elements, and focusing on increasing business agility.

There are lots of enterprise Agile frameworks - SAFe, NEXUS, LeSS, DAD, GROWS, Lean Enterprise, Modern Agile, and many others. They are all pretty good. But they all miss one important factor: how the heck do you get there? They describe perfect little "cities on the hill" but they don't give advice as to what to do when the program management office (PMO) cracks down on your status reporting, or when enterprise architecture wants yet another review of your design diagrams.

The Journey to Enterprise Agility is about just that - the journey. Lots of things can slow or stop an Agile transformation. But that doesn't mean these legacy groups are evil or even have bad intentions. They have their jobs to do. Your transformation effort needs to accommodate their needs as well as your own. To do this in a structured way, we use concepts and principles from the world of systems thinking. And not the systems thinking of Six Sigma or Lean Manufacturing, but a different school called "soft systems thinking" that is most helpful in dealing with problems of people and perspectives.

Think of this book as a guidebook to working on all the complicated, messy problems of changing software process in an enterprise. The Agile teams will first need to adapt to the legacy groups around them. And then later, the legacy groups can work on transforming themselves, morphing into something more nimble that can help to produce business value faster and more reliably than the old waterfall processes.