Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

The winner of the UK IT Industry IT Project Team of the Year gave a talk that I went to yesterday at the BCS. The project was the complete revamp of the London Borough of Southwark's website into a highly successful, fresh, engaging and efficient online channel.

There were a number of aspects of their approach that really resonated for me ... and echo many of our themes:

• There was a strong vision - "The Website should be the Channel of Choice"
• There was a flexible contract, allowing for change and innovation
• Governance was clear and lean
• Usability, design and information architecture were acknowledged as key drivers for the project
• A leading Content Management System (CMS) was used, replacing a proprietary system
• Incremental delivery was central to the project
• Self service implementation was a major feature of the project
• Metrics were incorporated into the system from the start and used to inform the prioritisation process

The project was given 90 days for change, partly because of budget and partly to finish before last year's election. The project delivered to this deadline, was under budget and has resulted in significant savings.

It was refreshing that the award went to the team as a whole, including the project management company (Vangent) and also the internal Southwark Council team who tackled the business change, training and content migration.

The only area where I think they missed a trick was that they didn't use fully Agile methods to manage the project (although they did use some of the elements of Agile as you can see from above).