Business Agility

We have all heard war stories of the "project that went wrong". The expectation is of perfection, delivering the specified software features on time, to budget and required level of quality. The reality is the wrong features arrived late and buggy, with over-spent budget. The resulting solution is just not what the business really wanted.

• Over-optimism (fantastic/fantasy schedules)
• Stream of changing requirements
• Poor productivity
• People problems
• Unplanned events & unexpected discoveries

General Eisenhower said “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable”. He captured the essence that planning is a continuing, live activity. This philosophy is embedded in modern iterative development methods. Combined with the frequent releases to market, this brings about a lower risk profile than the more traditional waterfall methods, and is a powerful mechanism to enable business agility.

The essence of the agile approach to product and service development is:

• Embrace change and welcome changing requirements
• Deliver working software frequently (the measure of progress)
• Enable business and developers to work closely together
• Gather motivated individuals in self-directed teams
• Devote time to frequent and regular reflection, tuning and adjustment of team working practices and behaviours

Sixhills is a signatory to the Agile Manifesto and a member of the DSDM Consortium, and has a wide experience of designing and implementing agile working methods, and can help clients on their transformation journey.