The Agile Readiness Assessment Tool Essay

The Agile development process using empowered, self-organizing teams has enabled a major shift in the Valpak management approach.

With mandatory projects, each business unit needs to identify what needs to be done with its current systems to comply with new regulations and then an enterprise leader needs to assess these for cross-business unit synergies, combining similar projects to make them more cost-effective (e.g., anti-money laundering initiatives). With maintenance projects, IT needs to identify what it needs to do to keep the technology environment up-to-date and what these will cost business needs to identify changes to its existing systems, enhancements and minor new development (under a certain cost) and what benefits it hopes to achieve. Each business unit and IT should be given a modest budget for this work and efforts made to keep these initiatives well-managed and cost-effective. Ideally, a modified business case should be prepared and priorities for this work should be made collaboratively by IT and the business unit involved. Furthermore, IT should identify opportunities to reduce application clutter and the costs and benefits involved. Business units could be given some incentives (e.g., a portion of the costs saved to be added to their development budgets) to work with IT to decommission old applications and to migrate to common ones. IT should monitor its effectiveness by quantifying the applications decommissioned and the costs saved. Finally, new development projects should follow the process outlined in 1 above. Once a project is approved, IT should be responsible

Many business use the agile organizational methodology. As they require the ability to remain flexible, enduring ever-changing requirements. The agile organization develops more mission-critical, high-profile systems. Sharing responsibility within small teams (of 15 or less) is also a main principle of an agile organization. Never is a hierarchy design operational in the agile organization, as the group possess the ability to over ride decisions made by management. The agile type of organization displayed itself over time as an entrepreneurial type of organization providing the high-speed changing rather than the standardization of a bureaucratic organization (Johnson, Jackson, & Burrows, 2011).

Agile team tries to build a product that meets the customer’s intent rather than the detailed description provided in the traditional methods, thus in the Agile PM customer becomes one of the team guide and member.

The purpose of this paragraph is to compare the article by Mike Cohn found at http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/sprint-retrospective to the article on the Agile Body of Knowledge (BOK) website: https://www.agilebok.org/docs/retrospectives/. Let’s look at the similarities first. Both articles are very short and deal with the subject of the Agile Retrospective Process. Each article describes the purpose of the retrospective, when it takes place during the agile project and what happens during a retrospective. The article by Mike Cohn contains several recommendations on how to perform the sprint, while the Agile BOK site provides a general description of the sprint process and then tells the reader where to go to find more information.

Agile processes do not devote much time up front to formal system specifications, but rather relies on continuous communication with the customer throughout the development process. The process accounts for the fact that needs often change or cannot be fully developed early on and is flexible to this. (+)

An a very fast paced business climate, organizations are forced to adapt and do things differently. A popular method for managing change while continuously delivering is to form Agile teams. Agile is to adapt to change when it occurs, rather than anticipated change (Smith, 2014). This mode of doing business is going to be foreign to some team members. The traditional way of task oriented thinking has changed. Project priorities and decision making are handed down to Agile teams. Team members are encouraged to work together as a team and also across teams. Everyone will have ownership and accountability for not only individual work but for the team work. There will be frequent changes to the direction

The Agile method can be more convincing if I apply the following 3 persuasive techniques (scarcity, authority, and consensus).

When an educational or non-profit organizations apply an Agile framework to its program development process, they can turn the obstacles of limited resources and restricted funding into opportunities. These opportunities include improved communication, productivity, flexibility of design, and typically at no additional cost. Implementing Agile it is more of a change in how we view and respond to the challenges in our respective development environments. The ability of an organization to understand what it does as a holistic system is the first step in becoming a learning organization (Anderson, 2004, p.11). A proven successful holistic development system can be found in the application of the idea-to-launch Stage-Gate system. Stage-Gate is the macro organizational plan that guides the overall development of a product or service, while the implementation of Agile is a micro level tactical process applied in the realization and testing stages of a products development. Put together, the Agile Stage-Gate development hybrid becomes a program development imperative to severely restricted resource organizations in the non-profit and education sectors.

• Improve developer productivity • Put the most critical information at developers’ fingertips • Deliver great results with all your Agile projects

Nowadays, the economy evolves rapidly and levels of competition force companies to adopt new approaches In order to keep up with market changes. Many large and medium scale companies have multiple projects and programs in progress, and they are using PMO as an essential part to apply to project management practices. Over time, many companies with long histories of successful PMO and project management practices may want to accelerate their project performance and adopt Agile as a new approach for their projects. As a result, this change can play an important role to raise different type of problems and difficulties between the existing PMO and Agile development team (Agile developers).

Agile techniques should be used to solve the current issues faced by the company as agile techniques normally being used by the software industry help the business to act in response under the unpredictable situations faced. In Agile methodologies opportunities are been provided to evaluate whether the project is under the direction all through its development cycle. All this is being accomplished with the help of regular tempo kept in work, and the teams must show a product which is having the desired potential.

This paper describes Agile development methodologies and their benefits. Section II presents key elements of Agile. Section III presents benefits of Agile development methodologies over traditional waterfall methodologies.

In conclusion, agile software development is a very exciting and useful approach, although some project suit agile more than others. The collaboration and visibility can provide a much better and rewarding experience for the team to develop software products. Over the last years, many companies dramatically improved their performances

For this report, I had chosen Agilent Technologies Sales (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd as my research topic. It is one of the branches in the world that delivers innovative technologies, solutions and services to a wide range of customers in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis.