Solutions for Agile Governance in the Enterprise (Sage)

Solutions for Agile Governance in the Enterprise (Sage) provides a practical framework for managing Agile product development across an organization—from individual teams to programs and portfolios. Rather than focusing primarily on Agile fundamentals, the book addresses the structural and process challenges that arise when multiple teams, products, and organizational groups must coordinate their work.

The book begins with a central idea: Agile is fundamentally about making decisions quickly. It defines governance as the formalization and exercise of repeatable decision-making practices, then develops an Agile approach to governance that emphasizes rapid decisions, lightweight artifacts, collaboration, and adaptation rather than heavy administrative oversight.

The framework spans three organizational levels: Agile Project Management, Agile Program Management, and Agile Portfolio Management. At the team level, the book provides detailed guidance on Scrum, Kanban, estimation, requirements, tracking, and metrics. At the program level, it addresses team organization, interaction costs, Release Planning, cross-team dependencies, coordination, and progress tracking. At the portfolio level, it covers business cases, prioritization, investment decisions, risk management, resource planning, budgeting, and decisions about whether to continue, modify, or terminate initiatives.

A distinctive focus of Sage is the application of Agile to hardware and integrated hardware-software product development. The book explains how Scrum can be adapted to the practical realities of hardware development and explores topics such as physical constraints, longer learning cycles, dependencies, scope management, team structures, and product refinement cycles. It also argues that Agile Program and Portfolio Management concepts can apply across both software and integrated hardware-software development.

The result is a framework intended to help organizations coordinate complex product development while maintaining the flexibility to respond when circumstances change. The book emphasizes providing enough structure to support effective collaboration and decision-making without creating unnecessarily rigid processes—a principle that remains central to the author's approach to Agile governance.

About the Author

Kevin Thompson, Ph.D. is an Agile transformation consultant and trainer specializing in Agile approaches for hardware and complex product development. He has led Agile consulting and transformation initiatives across more than 100 engineering organizations worldwide. His work focuses on improving delivery predictability, reducing late-stage surprises, and modernizing product-development systems for organizations developing complex physical and software-enabled products. The book grew out of his experience scaling Agile transformations and his subsequent work developing approaches for hardware and integrated hardware-software development.