Agile Enterprise Forum 2011
Charles Handy, Chris Potts, Don Reinertsen, John Seddon and I are the featured speakers in the Agile Enterprise Forum 2011. The Forum will be held on March 10, 2011 in the Chandos House at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Attendance is limited to 30 CIOs.
The theme for the forum is Agility for Complex Organizations. The overarching message is nicely captured in the following summary by James Yoxall:
There are two strands of interest for a CIO: strategy and delivery. The Agile/Lean message can be summarised as “merging” the two, so that delivery can start before strategy is complete, and delivery informs strategy through feedback loops. This leads to a faster/earlier delivery and a better end result.
My own workshop – Agile Governance: Tying Delivery to Value – builds on this message by describing a specific strategic initiative which is not achievable without the use of advanced delivery techniques. Here is the abstract for my workshop:
This workshop will explore mechanisms for unlocking the full potential of existing software through the combination of Agile/Lean methods with technical debt techniques. These mechanisms apply to complex organisations that rely on in-house development teams as well as to third party delivery partners. Israel’s approach emphasizes the need to continuously monitor and mitigate the decay of software that more often than not had been developed over many years. Most importantly, it shows how well-governed software can become the enabler for unleashing the synergistic power of cloud, mobile and social.
You can think of the workshop as linking past, present and future. The “sins” of the past require technical debt reduction initiatives today. These initiatives utilize the classical Agile/Lean techniques of continuous measurement and tight feedback loops. Without such initiative, the value of existing software cannot be unlocked in the future. In particular, competing in the hyper-segmented markets that cloud, mobile and social generate will be next to impossible for legacy software that has not been modernized.
The Agile Executive 
I can easily relate to the view that agile methods can help in parallelising strategy development and delivery. That can be a competitive advantage especially in environments where time to market is key. The notion “well-goverened” needs more explanation I think. Agile after all is also about self-organized teams. To make sure they are not also self-directed requires new IT-governance structures from my experience. Well-governed agile delivery is nothing that comes out-of-the box.
Thomas Spielhofer
November 18, 2010 at 8:46 am
You hit it on the head of the nail, Thomas! This is the very heart of my workshop at the forum.
Best,
Israel
israelgat
November 18, 2010 at 9:30 am
Until we discuss the subject in my workshop, I would recommend taking a look at chapters 12-13 in Jim Highsmith’s Agile Project Management (2nd edition).
Best,
Israel
israelgat
November 19, 2010 at 8:54 am
[…] Agile Enterprise Forum 2011 « The Agile Executive Israel’s approach emphasizes the need to continuously monitor and mitigate the decay of software that more often than not had been developed over many years. Most importantly, it shows how well-governed software can become the enabler for unleashing the synergistic power of cloud, mobile and social. (tags: software lean agile technical debt israel gat forum)
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November 19, 2010 at 11:03 am