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ABC of Essentialization

To be agile as teams, we need to adjust our approach to meet our immediate challenges and needs. To be agile as an organization, we need to learn collectively and evolve our approach over time to support our evolving mission, so that we continue to excel in an ever-changing environment. We would not call a TV set “adaptive” if, in order to adjust the volume, we had to throw it away and replace it with a model with a different volume setting. So why are we prepared to accept process frameworks that leave us in a similar predicament every time we want to improve our product development performance as an organization?

Industrial Scale Agile White Paper - Essence Agility

Industrial-­scale agile requires much more than just being able to scale agile. It also means taking a disciplined approach to ensuring that our IT investments are resulting in sustainable benefits for both the producing organization and its customers. This involves adopting a different approach to many aspects of agility. We need to look beyond small-­scale agile, beyond independent competitive islands of agile excellence, beyond individual craftsmanship and heroic teams, and beyond the short-­term, instant gratification that seems to be the focus of many well-­intentioned but self-­centered agile teams. It is this adoption of a more holistic approach that we call moving from craft to engineering. This paper is published at acm.org.

Queue.ACM Publication - Internet of things and Agile Methodologies with Essence Agility Toolset

The Industrial Internet Consortium predicts the IoT (Internet of Things) will become the third technological revolution after the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution. Its impact across all industries and businesses can hardly be imagined. Existing software (business, telecom, aerospace, defense, etc.) is expected to be modified or redesigned, and a huge amount of new software, solving new problems, will have to be developed. As a consequence, the software industry should welcome new and better methods. This article makes the case that to be a major player in this space you will need a multitude of methods, not just a single one. Existing popular approaches such as Scrum and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) may be part of the future, but you will also need many new methods and practices—some of which aren’t even known today. Extending a single method to incorporate all that is needed would result in something that is way too big and unwieldy. Instead, the new OMG (Object Management Group) standard Essence can be used to describe modular practices that can be composed together to form a multitude of methods, not only to provide for all of today’s needs, but also to be prepared for whatever the future may bring.

Industrial Scale Agile White Paper

Industrial-scale agile means that agile at any-and-every scale is business-as-usual for an organization, across its entire portfolio, and that this capability is continuously sustained and strengthened. This paper examines two leading frameworks that provide guidance on how to achieve success within this kind of “complexity at scale” challenge space - David Snowden’s Cynefin framework and Max Boisot’s I-Space framework.

Agile Measurements - Measuring what counts paper

Every agile organisation aims to run successful programmes that demonstrate true value and IT results, presented in a way the business can understand. But many struggle with showing how IT and the business are better, faster, cheaper or that their customers, users and other stakeholders are happier since going agile? The single biggest problem we see organisations continuing to grapple with in their agile transformation programmes is not understanding why they are changing the way they work – not visualising the goal, setting targets, measuring improvements, or demonstrating the benefits generated. The key here is to establish a set of actionable measures to drive the change and inspire the teams. These should explicitly support the principles and values being promoted and challenge the teams to improve.

Kernel Journal Cover Page image

Roly Stimson, Principal Consultant with Ivar Jacobson International, has been blogging on the topic of a software practice Kernel. These posts are now put together into an 'ejournal'. Download and read at your leisure on your laptop or hand-held device.

Image of the Use Cases 2.0 Book by Ivar Jacobson

Use-Case 2.0 re-focuses on the essentials and offers a slimmed down, leaner way of working, for software teams seeking the benefits of iterative, incremental development at an enterprise level

Use Cases are the Hub of the Software Development Lifecycle

Use Case Definition:  Use Cases have been around for almost 30 years as a requirements approach and have been part of the inspiration for more recent techniques such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case driven development - light, agile and lean - inspired by user stories, Scrum and Kanban.

Image showing the cover of the Use Case 2.0 e-Book - The Guide to Succeeding with Use Cases

Use-Case 2.0 re-focuses on the essentials and offers a slimmed down, leaner way of working, for software teams seeking the benefits of iterative, incremental development at an enterprise level.

Use-Case 2.0 The Hub of Software Development Paper - Dutch version

Use-Case 2.0 re-focuses on the essentials and offers a slimmed down, leaner way of working, for software teams seeking the benefits of iterative, incremental development at an enterprise level.

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