We hear a lot about the agility in business these days. For those of us in solutions development, the agile approach to managing projects is "flavour of the month" right now. To be agile is now the goal of almost every enterprise and the term has gained the status of a buzz word. But all this talk of agility has suddenly become very pertinent to me with the launch of the Alinement Network’s “magazine” site .....

The aim of this site is simple: create an on-line community of experienced management practitioners of different persuasions and point them towards discussing what it takes to achieve true alignment. That’s not just the classic quest for business and IT alignment, but establishing coherence across the different disciplines (one might say silos) that dominate management thinking today.

The goal is of course to help our members to be able to better manage and operate their businesses by identifying the essential set of compatible activities that I term the Enterprise Management Framework.

But while the vision maybe clear (at least to me), implementation, as always, is a little bit tougher. So we come fairly quickly to apply an agile approach to developing an online community site.

The original idea of having different "departments" established to cover areas like Project Management, Services Management, Enterprise Architecture and Governance soon evaporated. Oh, I did start to define a "product architecture" for the site. I sat down to create a design, I drew sketches but no definitive big-picture emerged. Time tick-tocked on - was there ever going to be a site built?

I knew order was tantalizingly close, I wanted to have editors for each of the departments but in talking to my collaborators I found that this was not going to be so easy.

My early contributors were keen to provide content but it did not easily fit into the structure (which after all, was largely still in my head) I was hoping to impose – no wonder architects are often disgruntled people!

I realized that I was tackling a VERY BIG PROBLEM that had not been addressed, or at least agreed, at the industry level. How the different specializations (that word, there will be more to say on that in time) work together is an issue in most organizations and discussing how the different agendas should fit together was in fact the objective.

My goal for the site was to breakdown some of our typically siloed thinking and find better ways working together across the business. But surely I didn’t have to solve this issue on my own - more good minds had to be applied to the problem.

That in fact is the real mission of the Alinement Network!

In the era of Wikipedia, Facebook and the whole “wisdom of the crowds” philosophy enabled by the Web 2.0 revolution, it is very old-world for any individual to try and solve a problem that requires wide consensus and agreement. Anyway, a wise man once told me that it was the role of a consultant to have the solution to a problem - researchers can make a contribution to knowledge by simply clarifying the problem.

So as the Alinement Network is a labour of love and no one is paying me, I’m not a consultant in this instance so do not have to pretend to have an answer. Anyway, this may not be the time to leap into solution-mode but to instead articulate the problem that needs to be addressed.

So pragmatism prevails, even if it is a little uncomfortable for a perfectionist.

There will be no departments in the early editions of this site - we are going to be Agile. And an architecture is in fact one of the expected outcomes of the early iterations. Not just in technology terms (where a lot more can be done) but in the content and organization of the material on the site.

So instead of having the "constraints" of a completely defined architecture you can join the community and be a part of its development - in fact, it is pretty well essential that a number of you feel inspired to turn into active contributors to keep the initiative alive.

Is that using agility as an excuse for incomplete thinking? Perhaps, but this would not be the first time it was used to cover inadequate preparation.

The test is of course in sustainability of the vision. If we can keep the site useful and exciting, there will be an opportunity to have emergent order and structures that make sense and take into account the deeper understandings of what such a site needs to be.

To persist with a rigorous design flies in the face of that awkward question - will this initiative meet with a modicum of success, or will it become yet another failed attempt at mobilizing the wider community?

So big goals and modest means lead us to this point. Will the agile approach work in this instance? Was there ever a choice? Like any modern development project, we do not have the resources to design the perfect site so we take an agile approach and do what we can in the first release.

If we are fortunate, we can expect the site to evolve and be continuously refined until we have something we can all be proud of. What we have is the result enthusiasm and available resources, and with that we have managed to create a stage with a few props contributed by fellow believers.

It is now time to back away and leave it to you to see if you can envision a future for this venture.