Agile: An Executive Guide: Real results from IT budgets
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About this ebook
Agile: An Executive Guide describes Agile methods in clear business language specifically written for professionals. It will help you make realistic business-driven decisions on whether Agile methods are appropriate for your organisation; whether you are looking to reduce your IT overheads, provide better software solutions to your clients, or have more control over your IT expenditures. This guide provides practical, proven ways to introduce, incorporate and leverage Agile methods to maximise your business returns.
Jamie Lynn Cooke
Jamie Lynn Cooke has 27 years of experience as a senior business analyst and solutions consultant, working with more than 130 public and private sector organisations throughout Australia, Canada, and the United States. Her background includes business case development; strategic and operational reviews; business process modeling, mapping, and optimization; product and project management on small to multi-million-dollar initiatives; quality management; risk analysis and mitigation; developing/conducting training courses; workshop delivery; and refining e-business strategies. She is the author of Agile Principles Unleashed, a book written specifically to explain Agile in non-technical business terms to managers and executives outside of the IT industry; Agile: An Executive Guide: Real results from IT budgets, which gives IT executives the tools and strategies needed for bottom-line business decisions on using Agile methodologies; Everything you want to know about Agile: How to get Agile results in a less-than-Agile organisation, which gives readers strategies for aligning Agile work within the reporting, budgeting, staffing, and governance constraints of their organisation; and PRINCE2 Agile™ An Implementation Pocket Guide: Step-by-step advice for every project type, a hands-on guide for successfully delivering projects within the PRINCE2 Agile™ framework.
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Agile - Jamie Lynn Cooke
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CHAPTER 1: AN EXECUTIVE BRIEF ON AGILE²
What is Agile?
'Agile' is a collective term for methods (and practices) that have emerged over the past two decades to increase the relevance, flexibility and business value of software solutions. These approaches are specifically intended to address the problems that have historically plagued software development activities in the IT industry, including budget overruns, missed deadlines, low quality outputs, and dissatisfied users.
Agile methods are common-sense approaches for applying the finite resources of an organization to deliver high business-value software solutions.
Although there is a broad range of Agile methods in the IT industry – from software development and project delivery approaches to strategies for software maintenance – all of these methods share the same basic objectives:
replace large up-front investment in software solutions with incremental investment based on business value returns
focus project team members on delivering capabilities that generate the highest business value for the organization
encourage ongoing communication between the business areas and project team members to increase the relevance, usability and quality of delivered software
entrust and empower staff to deliver value
position software solutions to be responsive to ongoing industry, organizational and technology changes.
Some of the most common Agile methods include:
iterative strategies for managing software development projects, such as Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Feature-Driven Development™ (FDD™), the Rational Unified Process® (RUP®), and the Agile Unified Process (AUP)
strategies for optimizing software development work, such as eXtreme Programming (XP™), and Lean Development
strategies for managing software development projects, as well as maintenance and support activities, such as Kanban and Scrumban
extensions of Agile methods to support large enterprise-wide teams and shared corporate objectives, such as the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), Scrum of Scrums, Large-Scale Scrum Framework (LeSS) and Nexus.³
These Agile methods have been (and continue to be) successfully used by thousands of organizations worldwide⁴, most notably in the United States, Europe and Australia. Some of the more prominent organizations using Agile methods include Nokia Siemens Networks™⁵, Yahoo!™⁶, Google™⁷, Microsoft™⁸, BT™⁹, Bankwest™¹⁰, SunCorp™¹¹, and Wells Fargo™¹².
In order to fully appreciate the effectiveness of Agile methods, it is worthwhile taking a couple of minutes to understand the business environment that caused these approaches to be established in the first