Resources

Key to realizing benefits from agile is strong customer representation through empowered Product Ownership – to guide the team in delivering a solution that maximizes end-user value. But this is also often the hardest agile practice to get working effectively, because of its novelty for many stepping into the role, and because of the challenges in balancing time commitments with existing business responsibilities, and combining incisive decision-making with broad-based stakeholder representation and negotiation. Download the infographic and post it on your wall as a daily reminder of what's needed or better yet, download our Product Ownership Health Check Guide.

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.

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.

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.

In this fast-paced, responsive world, software development teams are adopting agile techniques to speed up development times and reduce risks, while simultaneously becoming more responsive to the needs of their customers. Many organisations have kick-started their agile journey and many have successfully introduced agile on a team basis; however, the real challenge is ensuring that agile can scale and is sustainable as corporate plans and personnel evolve over time. Helping organizations embed, sustain and scale agile ways of working is at the heart of Ivar Jacobson International's (IJI) expertise, skillset and intellectual property.

This paper discusses IJI's proven approach to sustainable change, and how under proper guidance from a well-formed Change Initiative, Practice Hubs, Coaching Hubs, and Communities of Practice can help make change "stick".

While many organizations have turned to agile as a way to streamline their development processes, the road to successfully implementing agile is bumpy. For organizations who want to achieve and maintain a sustainable agile transformation long-term, Ivar Jacobson, founder and chairman of Ivar Jacobson International, and Ian Spence, head of research and development at Ivar Jacobson International, shed some light on how to do that.