What their answers came down to was that employee and customer expectations are changing and that in turn, the business has to change. Customers have come to expect Web-based services, and they want them now. That means that IT has to swap out older systems and business processes quickly. Employees don’t want to wait four years — or even four months — for new features and fixes to be rolled out. It’s about giving the business a competitive advantage through faster IT deployments.

If that isn’t enough to convince you, Alex Adamopoulos, CEO at New York-based Agile consultancy Emergn, whose clients include British Airways, British Telecom and Standard Life, has five more reasons for adopting Agile practices:

1. To stop project paralysis: Agile translates into faster feedback and faster delivery. That means that IT delivers projects that keep up with the pace of the market and customer expectations.
2. To accommodate change: Plan for change with Agile, instead of protecting the process and focusing on mitigating the risk of inevitable change.
3. To make room for innovation: Agile allows for employee creativity and better idea management, which is often stymied by heavier processes.
4. To improve the work environment: Agile enables companies to invest in their people and to “up-skill” them. As a result, Agile leads to happier, more productive employees who in turn feel more passion and ownership towards their work.
5. To give the businesses transparency and control: Agile lets businesses identify where the greatest value exists in the organization’s portfolio of projects. Thus, Agile improves overall quality in delivering any type of project in the organization (IT or business related).

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director

Take the example of General Electric, which had too many software development approaches across GE Energy. When Agile was introduced, detractors complained it would be a “willy-nilly” approach, versus a familiar structured approach, such as waterfall, explained Paul Rogers, executive manager of GE Energy’s Software Solutions Group (SSG).

However, as Rogers explained at the recent Forrester Research event in Boston, Agile practices brought order to GE’s SSG by getting teams across the organization on the same development page, following one documented and governed methodology.

“In waterfall, it appears that you’re going from step to step. The product requirements document is created and sent to the technical requirements folks. They decompose it and send it to the coders. The coders send to it QA/QC, and you get the perfect product at the end,” Rogers said. “The problem with that is that with each handoff there is a different interpretation of the specs down the line.”

That’s a pretty unpredictable development process, he said, and the main reason SSG opted to make Agile the official methodology. All SSG employees were required to learn the GE-branded curriculum and become certified in the same Agile methodologies. The GE-branded part is a key point, since a lot of people have a different opinion of what Agile is and is not, he said.

The BPM approach

Taking the guesswork and, yes, chaos out of project management can also be achieved by using business process management (BPM) software to introduce Agile methodologies.

When a new product or service is being considered at a company, BPM identifies which processes will be affected. If changes need to be made to a process to accommodate a new product or service, it can be done quickly. Also, if a business process can not be changed — for example, a given process may protect the organization from violating a regulation — then the decision can be made on the fly not to change it.

“Being able to identify how business processes may need to change and who in particular needs to make that change, versus getting 100 people involved to see if a change might violate a standard or regulations, allows [project] teams to be Agile and flexible, and recognize where Agile is not possible,” said Mathias Kirchmer, executive director of Accenture’s BPM practice.

Yet another example provided at the Forrester event of Agile methodologies reining in a major project was Dan Simpson’s business transformation effort while CIO of Physicians Mutual (he joined Trustmark as CIO this month).

As Simpson told the audience, he was brought in to get rid of legacy systems and create a new set of modern services focused on customer needs and buying habits. His go-to solution was SOA. In the end he created services that could be reused time and again when a new application or service was called for by the business or customers. The main benefit? He delivered on his promise to create a single information view for the customer … and introduced Agile methodologies in the process.

“We decided to implement close to 40 new projects as part of the business transformation effort over a period of years,” Simpson said in an interview with SearchCIO.com. “Iterative development using Agile methods was our ’Agile version‘ for those projects. [That iterative method] was how we determined if user requirements were actually being understood during the development process, rather than us implementing something and finding out users aren’t satisfied.”

Agile saved them a lot of grief in terms of having to correct mistakes and redirect projects.

One takeaway from both Rogers and Simpson? Agile methodologies are going to vary from company to company, but you need to come to an agreement as to what Agile means in your particular situation — then document it, educate everyone and stick to it.