Agile Project Management has something to say about managing the enterprise through Program Management, Business Strategy and the execution side of delivering value to the stakeholders. With that said, the success factors for an agile enterprise must be addressed directly through the practices of Agile Project Management defined in "Enterprises as Systems: Essential Challenges and Approaches to Transformation," William B. Rouse, Systems Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2005.
- Growth - increasing impact from saturated or declining markets - all the efforts to "get agile" must address the impacts from these external factors.
- Value - enhancing the relationships of processes to benefits and costs - no matter the noble goal of increasing value, a balanced assessment is needed. The cost of achieving value, the sustainability of this value, even the units of measure of value must be transformed into specific units of measure that can be traced to things like the balance sheet, budgets, and project performance.
- Focus - pursuing opportunities and avoiding diversions - by staying on message project and program managers can also stay connected to the strategic objectives. This connection is the basis of success for any portfolio management process.
- Future - investing in inherently unpredictable outcomes - this is the normal operating mode of any collection of enterprise projects. Management in the presence of uncertainty is not only a critical success factor it is the core of agile.
- Knowledge - transforming information to insights to programs - principles to practices is the starting point in this transformation.
- Time - carefully allocating the organization's scarcest resource - is the primary role of project and program management. Without a map between strategy and execution, the utilization of resources (time and labor) is not only difficult, it is not possible.
