Do you like the idea of Agile software development, but you don’t think it’s a fit at your organization? Perhaps your enterprise is too rigidly hierarchical, or maybe your projects are too large and complex for Agile?
Think again. Agile is well on its way to becoming the standard approach for developing software, even for immense, complex applications for enterprise use. Just ask the United States federal government.
That’s the news from this week’s Agile in Government: Mutual Adaptation conference, put on by The Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), a government IT-focused nonprofit organization. This conference focused in particular on adapting Agile to the government’s labyrinthine acquisition policies and procedures, and vice versa.
Roger Baker set the bar for the discussion in his keynote presentation. Baker is currently the Chief Strategy Officer of government contractor Agilex Technologies, recently acquired by Accenture.
However, much of his presentation focused on lessons he learned as the Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where he served from 2009 – 2013. He’s been involved in federal government IT since he became the CIO for the US Department of Commerce in 1998.
The Insanity of Waterfall
Baker wasted no time taking aim at waterfall, the standard, step-by-step approach to building software whose problems Agile in large part was created to address. “Einstein’s rule is my definition of waterfall development,” Baker quipped, referring of course to the familiar quotation “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/02/27/dispelling-the-myths-of-agile/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
