Insight IndigoBlue at the Agile Business Conference

Tweet

Mail

This year's Agile Business Conference was the best yet. There was a great level of attendance with a good number of large enterprises attending. There were some great talks, from both Agile specialists and user companies.

The conference is a great platform for Agile and really demonstrates the increasing take up of Agile in businesses of all sizes in the UK.

We had two speakers - James Yoxall and Mike Robinson - and I thought it would be useful to bring together their talks and related material.

Keynote: Agile Supercharged - Scaling Agile as a Business Change Tool

James Yoxall

Kevin Heery

IndigoBlue's James Yoxall and Kevin Heery, IPC Media's Digital Technology Director, presented a keynote at the Agile Business Conference 2012 on scaling Agile. IPC Media has successfully used Agile for a number of years - they won the award for Most Engaged Management Team at the 2011 Agile Awards for example. In their keynote James and Kevin looked at taking Agile to the "next level".

We do not do Agile because it is simply a good thing. We do Agile because it delivers benefits. It therefore follows that we want to maximise those benefits. To truly achieve this we need to be clear about what the intended benefits are, and more importantly we need to detect when they are not being achieved and do things differently.

There are common approaches to Agile adoption that can result in sub-optimal implementations. While they may produce better results than non-Agile processes, they stop because “better” is deemed good enough. This becomes more significant as Agile is being used on more and more complex problems – simply “turning the handle” is not enough.

IPC Media has been through a successful Agile adoption initiative that started 5 years ago, and have created an award-winning environment. With all these good things in place it was still recognised that key benefits were not being fully realised, particularly around the area of maximising business benefit.

The keynote presents the approach taken to move Agile on to the “next level” at IPC Media, and the wider lessons learned that will be useful to other organisations adopting, or looking to improve, their use of Agile.

Presentation: Icebreaker? A Dynamic Approach to Uncertainty Management

Mike Robinson

Mike Robinson provided IndigoBlue's latest insights into the management of uncertainty using Agile techniques.

Agile projects aim to achieve a steady flow of delivery. Many fail. This is often because they have shortened their planning horizons and not seen the need which exists – particularly in large enterprises – to explicitly manage the uncertainty within requirements over the full lifecycle. This session looks at a combination of Agile techniques that can help a team to re-gain insight into and control over the flight path of ideas from idea to value.

White Paper and Webinar: Agile Governance From The Top Down

James Yoxall

Agile as a project approach enables value creation whilst also empowering sponsors and senior stakeholders to affect governance over the investment. However, this depends on effective mechanisms for translating the team view into a stakeholder view of progress, risk and opportunity. This paper identifies the challenges and solutions in achieving this translation.

The adoption of an Agile approach to product development and delivery is fundamentally concerned with incremental delivery of value through collaboration between team members. It is therefore different to the structured and process heavy waterfall approach, where the development and delivery lifecycle erects barriers between different teams for each lifecycle stage.

Organisations that have traditionally used the waterfall approach have developed structures and processes for the management and governance of both project and operational activities. These are based on alignment between the operational management of capabilities and project lifecycle stages that map to specialisms such as business analysis, technical design, development, and testing. The transition from waterfall to Agile challenges these structures and processes and requires change at all levels.

Conversely, Agile team culture has a strong inward focus that often leaves senior managers feeling uncomfortably distant from what is happening within projects and unsure of how to create the opportunity for team success whilst feeling confident that they can fulfil their management and governance accountabilities.

This white paper, together with the webinar recording for the Agile Business Conference explores the challenges and sets out a template for effective Agile Governance.

White Paper: Agile with PRINCE2

James Yoxall

This paper presents IndigoBlue’s approach to integrating Agile with PRINCE2. It explains why the two approaches can be used together at a conceptual level, and follows with a discussion of the key differences and how they can be resolved. This paper assumes that the reader has a prior level of knowledge of the two approaches.

It is often supposed that Agile and PRINCE2 conflict directly with each other, and cannot be used effectively together. The basis of this view is that PRINCE2 is ‘process-heavy’, while Agile is ‘process-light’.

In reality, both processes are highly configurable, and PRINCE2 can certainly be implemented in an acceptably light form. It should also be noted that PRINCE2 is a generic process, intended to cover a wide range of different project types, and should therefore be able to accommodate an Agile implementation approach.

Both approaches provide mechanisms to avoid common project pitfalls, and significant risk-reduction can be realised by understanding the underlying principles of both and implementing a combined process. IndigoBlue’s standard process is based on this view, derived from our in-depth experience of both traditional and Agile processes.

IndigoBlue Governance Framework

Rob Smith

IndigoBlue’s governance framework was created in response to the lack of an adequate set of governance processes for Agile projects and programmes. The absence of good governance is particularly apparent on larger programmes or within organisations running a number of Agile projects.

The framework provides a set of artefacts and processes that help with the effective control and reporting of any change initiative, but also include a number of additional features to deal with Agile processes. These include effective management and reporting of scope via the creation of an incremental strategy and uncertainty management to make areas of uncertainty and the plan for resolving uncertainty explicit, rather than relying on the traditional assumptions.

The framework brings together much IndigoBlue's approach described above and gives our clients a comprehensive framework and toolkit that enables effective governance of incremental, Agile projects. Developed over 10 years, it encapsulates many man-years practical experience of enterprise-scale Agile project delivery and of working with organisations to develop sustainable capability in delivering incremental change.