Essence

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.

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.

Essence provided a common view of their application development process.

"The outcome was a triumph, and was extremely effective in achieving our ambitious goals."

Presentation & Speaking Notes - Ed Seymour, Cloud Domain Architect from Red Hat looks at how SEMAT helps Red Hat manage an assortment of approaches when working with varied and disparate clients; how it provides a consistent view across all projects irrespective of the approach taken, even if SEMAT was not considered during project initiation. Furthermore, he looks at how SEMAT is helping Red Hat patch the holes in existing approaches, and providing a framework for developing new practices to support evolving techniques, and emerging technologies.

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.

Scaling Agile to 1200 people with reduction of delivery cycle time from 3 months to 1 month.

The Practice Workbench™ is a comprehensive development environment for practices, and complements the EssWork platform by providing a robust, professional, and productive authoring and development experience. The Practice Workbench™ helps practice authors and method engineers to focus on the essential business values of practice and method descriptions, and makes it easy and intuitive to develop and deploy practices based on a kernel.

Organizations often require teams to use a standard software development or application management lifecycle. Often these are defined in a way that overly restricts the freedom of the development teams, and focus on the specific work products to be produced rather than the results or state to be achieved. Using the Alpha State cards this can be done in a lightweight, result focused way that is independent of the practice that the team selects to achieve the goals. Use this game to visualize your software development lifecycle to form a starting point for team planning. Download...