Essential Practices

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.

The Essence Agile Essentials practice cards aid team-based software development by ensuring that core agile team practices are transparent and effective. Each practice contains a small number of cards that provide useful, structured advice on how to apply the practice. The set represents a useful and usable set of practice cards that development teams can freely select, combine and adapt to help them work effectively as a team.

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.

IJI has been engaged with a major UK bank over the last 18 months helping them introduce new methods of working, and IBM’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management tooling to support these methods. Business Analysts now capture their requirements in Rational Requirements Composer (RRC), Solution Architects create their designs in Rational Software Architect (RSA) using the Unified Modelling Language (UML), Infrastructure & Security Architects add deployment topologies to the designs using RSA’s Deployment Planning extension, and everything is underpinned by Work Items and Source Control in Rational Team Concert (RTC).

"I firmly believe that this work... will have a profound impact on governments and corporations worldwide, as they seek excellence, efficiency and profitability. It is an authoritative guide on how to realize the ultimate adaptive enterprise architecture..." - Dan L. Jonson, Avemco Corporation. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the key management trend of the day. Ivar Jacobson's book, The Object Advantage, presents a blueprint for re-designing a business according to BPR principles. It uses one method to integrate his work of reengineering a business, its processes and its vital infrastructure the information system. It describes all of the details about a business and its processes by viewing customers as users and business processes as cases of how they use the business "use cases". And it manages the risks involved in BPR by using a how-to method based on object technology, offering concrete guidance in the shape of a formal reengineering process. Whilst most books tackle the "soft factors" (motivation, management commitment, leadership), The Object Advantage goes beyond this type of hand-waving and offers practical steps to success that include: * A description that specifies every activity and deliverable involved in the business process Deliverables, in the form of business models, that focus on the company's architecture and dynamics * A process for the development of an information system that is truly integral to the reengineered company * A seamless relationship is created between business model and information system, vastly increasing a company's chances of successfully re-enginneering itself - the heart of this relationship is the application of the BPR model and object technology. Ivar Jacobson's book will be essential reading for any manager contemplating reengineering their business or wishing to understand more about BPR and its practical implementation. It will also be invaluable for re-enginnering teams re-designing their companies, employees within a reengineered company needing to understand how their new environment will work and what their role will be, and systems analysts and designers wanting to expand their current applications of object technology into business modeling and business reengineering.