How do you recognise an Agile company? What characteristics do they display? How are they different?

This is not an easy question to put a concise response to.

It's difficult to characterize an entire organisation as 'Agile' without working with them for a while either as a partner or as a member of staff - you need to assemble some tacit knowledge about that companies' culture and decision making process.

It's much easier to analyze a specific product development team as you can look at their environment, team identity, output etc. There are a couple of properties one can extrapolate from such a team to it's surrounding company - is the team empowered to perform its function? is there respect between the team and the company? does the team have a clear project charter and product owner? You can get a pretty good feel for what the company is like from these kind of indicators.

It's also good to look at the relationship the company has with its partners and suppliers - do they enter into mutual benefit partnerships and work proactively with suppliers to improve both companies' positions? Essentially you're trying to determine how much trust exists in these relationships - it's not the only indicator but it is a useful one - it allures to the underlying culture of an organisation.

Structurally I would expect an Agile organisation to be 'wide and not deep'; management hierarchy and bureaucracy is kept to a minimum with workers being aligned along product streams rather than into functional hierarchies such as 'technology' and 'hr'. A key metric here is how many organisational hops it takes to get from a frontline worker to the decision maker for a given activity (and indeed, through how many organisational boundaries) - the less hops the more adaptive and responsive they will be. Agility requires exceptionally clear, noise-free internal communication so, generally speaking, agility decreases with company size; the 'most Agile' companies I have experienced have been small in size, often being start-ups. Strong senior leadership sets the vision & stategy which is reinforced right through the company with clear project charters - SCRUM teams which hold higher level scrums can be highly effective for this purpose.

Technologically an Agile company does not depend upon 'core' systems; systems that are brittle, difficult & time-consuming to change. Solutions should be simple.

There are a number of other characteristics you would expect to see such as a low staff attrition rate, a diverse and specialized product portfolio, a positive marketplace perception to name but a few.

In my mind agility is about awareness & balance - change is driven from empirical inspection & learning; goals are clear and coherent; people are trusted and empowered.

--Gus