Agile

When I first joined the Cisco IT team in 2018 after graduating from university, I was eager to see how a large, global company like Cisco can efficiently develop and deliver solutions to its customers. I quickly discovered that while Cisco is big and complex, it operates very much like an agile star…

Agile has long been considered an exclusive software paradigm. Agility as we all know is a mindset and as the Law of Conservation of Agility states, it needs to be inculcated. Imagine that you want to go on a healthy diet, and you focus only on lunch, ignoring the dietary considerations of breakfast…

Last evening, I had a lively discussion with my friend Paul on the state of agility in his organization, a midsize company of about 6000 employees. He mentioned that agile is the flavor of the year in his organization and that their executive Samuel had set a goal “We shall be agile by the end of th…

Remember the law of conservation of energy which is one of the basic laws of physics and therefore governs the microscopic motion of individual atoms in a chemical reaction? This law states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one f…

Happy New (Fiscal) Year, Cisco! We are kicking-off Fiscal Year 2020 with a special #TeamDevNet #CiscoChat LIVE! featuring: Bill Hentschell (@BHentschell) John McDonough (@johnamcdonough) Patrick Rockholz (@patrickrockholz) …and moderated by yours truly (@silviakspiva). The #CiscoChat LIVE! will be o…

I know a lot of bad words that begin with the letter “F,” but failure is NOT one of them. For sure, there do exist inexcusable failures in an organization: failure to meet your sales targets, production targets, operational expense targets, etc. It is easy for us to become so caught up in our search…

The value of seniority in traditional organizations is less about accumulating vacation days and more about knowing how to get things done and who to go to for what. In the past, this “tribal knowledge”—information and experience from veteran employees—was buried in hard drives or only passed down f…

Cisco launched Secure Agile Exchange (SAE) last week in Berlin, Germany, as part of Cisco Live Europe.  It was part of our  DNA Virtualization announcement  – so subtle you might have even missed it.  We’ve been working on Secure Agile Exchange (SAE) for the last 3 years.  We have a few custom…

Recently, I met with many industry analysts, customers, and press at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. In numerous conversations, I was asked about the organizational implications of changing company culture and how this relates to digital business transformation. As you create a culture of agility (see prev…