As noted in my previous blog, Social Business and Agile Methods: A Perfect Match. Part 1, I firmly believe that cross-pollination between agile methodology and social business is needed to shorten project schedules, access wider pools of innovation and deliver on the promise of business agility.

Below is an attempt at formulating just such a merger.

Some agile process purists are still on the fence about applying their methods more broadly to other fields. But in my experience as a business-transformation practitioner, I find that agile methods are quite applicable to many creative activities involving teams of people. That’s why the focus described below can apply to general-purpose business processes of any kind instead of specific types of people-based activities, such as software development. Some processes are more amenable to agility than others, just as some are easier to transform with social business.

The general rule is that the less collaborative, less changeable and more user-isolated a business activity inherently is, the less applicable either agile or social business methods will be to it. Conversely, most complex, open-ended and outcome-oriented business processes involving groups of people working in tandem — such as knowledge work in finance, science, engineering and medicine — can be better addressed with both agile and social methods working in tandem. If that's so, it makes sense to integrate them better, rather than applying them separately to the same business activity.

The points below show how agility and social business compare, contrast and support each other:

• Coordination Instead of Control. Agility and social business methods both avoid using centralized hierarchies to achieve deterministic control. In lieu of this, as leading agilist Brad Appleton has observed, they both work best with autonomous, adaptive and accountable actors. The first two aspects — autonomous and adaptive — apply equally well to social business, while the latter (accountability) is a natural part of any social environment that has user identity. The key point is that emergence — a unique and prized aspect of enterprise social media — and self-organization are very similar and are core values in each discipline.
• Design for Change/Loss of Control. Agile and social approaches both work best in an environment of controlled chaos. Encouraging emergence, and ensuring that it's not accidentally prevented, requires accepting that external change is desired. Emergence should be responded to productively to get the right results with the resources at hand. For example, ignoring that customers need requirements, that the planned outcome of a collaborative process won’t provide the expected benefits, and otherwise denying reality are anathema to both disciplines.
  

It is true that the profound reverence for steering processes from ground truth (and hard data) is usually better defined in agile methods. Social business methods like crowdsourcing and social collaboration recognize that most productive output is on the edge of the network and largely outside of formal control. But measuring community sentiment is often as far as it goes in terms of responding to change — although informally the community changes the direction of the process all the time.

As a result of these traits, the best results in both approaches come when there are tight feedback loops to all stakeholders and when a planned response to that feedback is the central factor in re-engagement with the project or online community in the next cycle. For more details, read Tim Leberecht’s insightful overview of this issue: Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control.

• Rapid Work Cycles. Agile methods call work cycles "iterations." Social business doesn’t have as strong a notion of discrete work cycles because it’s essentially continuous and is itself emergent. In essence, it's a more extreme version of iterations, at least when you look at collaborative work in social media environments such as crowdsourcing efforts or social CRM. Either way, the project and/or community assesses and responds to change at the end of each iteration, or does it almost continuously, as in the case of social business processes.
• Open Participation. The best results of social business are when the broadest possible net is cast for stakeholders to connect to the project or process and then contribute. Agile processes confine valid contributors to a much narrower, more well-defined audience, though open participation is entirely up to the project and does happen. Social business advocates that “anyone can contribute” — one of the most powerful concepts in recent business history. Only those who care about the outcome will get involved, yet that’s almost always more people than traditionally expected. Social business actively encourages and is very good at driving mass collaboration. Agile methods could learn from social media’s extreme openness and its lower contribution barriers.
• Working Results. Agile processes value a working outcome as often as possible at any given time in the project. When the requirements are right and/or the budget runs out, stakeholders have any output possible at that point and it's in early working order. Social business is not yet so disciplined in its directed outcomes, yet by its very nature is always up to date with the latest revisions, contributions or updates.
• Continuous Processes. While agile processes use frequent iterations, milestones, review steps and other processes to make rapid course corrections (typically every few days or weeks at most), social business is at an even higher velocity and larger scale. Consider real-time processes that run around the clock globally involving tens of thousands and sometimes a million or more simultaneous contributors. And think open source projects, which actually do this for software development. This means the scale and velocity of social business often outpaces agile by several orders of magnitude — a very surprising difference, given that agile is already quite a bit faster than traditional methods. For its part, social business could learn a lot about continuity (builds, releases, work product iterations, etc.), while agile can learn to scale and accelerate outcomes in a way it never could before.

While this breakdown is a good beginning, it's only an initial attempt to connect these two closely related fields. I'm hoping to start a useful discussion, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about where there might be nuances to change or details to be tweaked. Add your comments or contact me on Smart Enterprise Exchange.