I had the opportunity to visit one of our clients this week, which happens to be a Fortune 500 company. As with most Fortune 500 companies, this client's I.T. organization is a behemoth.
Doing a bit of googling, I discovered that the word behemoth comes from an Egyptian word for hippopotamus. As everyone knows, the hippopotamus is an enormous, lumbering animal that enjoys wallowing in mud.
Or is it? Referencing Wikipedia, I discovered that although the hippopotamus is enormous (only elephants are consistently larger) and does spend its time wallowing in mud, it is not necessarily lumbering. Only most of the time.
When aroused or threatened, the hippopotamus will sprint at up to 30 miles per hour for short distances and is one of the most dangerous mammals in the wild.
Like the hippopotamus, I.T. in the Fortune 500 consistently moves slowly and awkwardly, year after year, fumbling through costly projects and delivering dubious returns. Occasionally, however, one of these behemoths will raise its belly out of the mud and get its ire up. Very occasionally even enough to do a 30 mph sprint.
The particular client that I visited is in the middle of its own 30 mph sprint. Disappointed by the internal I.T. teams' ability to deliver value rapidly, they set up a special projects team outside of the confines of the rest of the I.T. organization. The team was given the leeway to deliver projects they way they saw fit. The catch, though, was that they had to deliver. The team leaders chose to use eXtreme Programming (XP) and a lightweight, open source Java technology stack. After 5 months of development, the first application was released to production with great fanfare.
If you work within an I.T. behemoth, do not resign yourself to the lumbering pace that is the norm. Find a way to get the ire up in your organization, spin off an agile team, and sprint like a hippopotamus.
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