Publications

We must work as a team! Teamwork is critical! There’s no ‘I’ in team! These mantras are plentiful and many Agilists believe that success at the team level is the foundation to success at the organizational level. But what does it really mean to work as team and is there a common recipe to build and grow a successful agile team? Agile believes in principles before practices and in multi-disciplined, self-organizing teams. All teams need direction and guidance, but with an agile approach no one should be telling the team how to do their job. Teams need to be empowered to make choices rather than be told exactly what to do. But sometimes things can start to unravel and too much time and energy can be wasted arguing about the basics. You can forget about scaling agile if your team is unable to clearly demonstrate the value of agile at the team level. But, get the basics right at the team level and engaged, highly motivated, cross-functional teams of teams can follow.

Change. This simple word has been used to create communities, build businesses, and promote adoption within a myriad of other actionable objectives. It is as common as the air we breathe and as revolutionary as any invention. Yet in all of its grandeur, it has incessantly stumped many businesses and individuals along the way. Software has taken a front seat in several organizations. It has become the core to any business, and change initiatives have sprouted and evolved to provide better solutions, be they faster, smarter or more affordable. Furthermore, for those organizations that adapt to change well and continue to sustain said changes and evolve over time, the rewards are exponential and in many cases, lasting. As new companies emerge in markets offering innovative solutions that can ultimately disrupt the market, those organization that cannot and or will not adapt and change, and perhaps more importantly, sustain change will lose. As a result, software development teams are adopting agile development techniques to shorten development times, decrease risk, all whilst developing solutions to become more responsive to the needs of the business.

One of the biggest challenges with agile change programs is achieving lasting change. So often, external consultants are brought in to impart their expertise in specific areas, only for this expertise to disappear as soon as the consultants leave. Our goal is to help you to change culture and behaviours in a lasting way, so that you can become truly independent and self-sufficient in new ways of working.

Project sponsors are like powerful tools - when engaged effectively they can clear seemingly insurmountable barriers and pave the way to success. When engaged ineffectively they can make any project a living nightmare. In this webinar we will discuss strategies for involving project sponsors at the appropriate times, for the appropriate reasons, so that the project sponsor works for you, rather than the other way around.

As with any new initiative people are struggling to see how it fits into the world and how it relates to all the other things going on. For example does it improve or replace their current ways of working. Is it something like lean that supports and furthers the aims of the Agile Movement, or is it something like waterfall planning that is in opposition to an agile approach? The good news is that both Agile and SEMAT promote non-prescriptive value-based philosophies that encourage software development teams to select and use whatever practices best fit their context and, most importantly, continuously inspect, adapt and improve their way of working. In this keynote we will look at how these two initiatives complement one another, providing the perfect foundation for teams that want to master the art of software development.

Learn how to use simple cards and checklists to achieve lean governance for agile software development projects and programs. First presented as a webinar by Ian Spence on 23rd April 2014.

A successful, sustainable agile transformation is one that creates a self-sustaining, continuously learning organization focused on delivering improved business results. Setting up empowered communities of practice and encouraging knowledge-sharing via practice/knowledge hubs are critical elements to success.

A truly agile organization is a learning organization continually refining and improving all its practices. It is not an organization that flits from one fad to another or continuously replaces one flawed process with another, more fashionable one. Change is constant and a sustainable agile transformation harnesses practices to embed and sustain an agile program.

It's been said that the only real sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition. Learn how in this webinar presented on June 18th by Brian Kerr of Ivar Jacobson International.

A mistake that many organizations make is to think that agility is an end in itself rather than an enabler for better business performance. It's critical for organizations to always remember why they are implementing an agile approach. In this webinar, Ian will share with participants how IJI has helped its clients to quantify the results they were looking for and how they measured the effect of their transformation on their business.