Agile Enablement: A New Approach to Project Management and Project Governance

Overview:

Is your organization challenged by growth and product complexity? Are quality and product adaptability declining? Is your ability to reliably deliver results hindered by an erosion of technical skills and domain knowledge?

Are you considering agile project management and/or software development practices to help you overcome these challenges? Incorporating agile practices into your product development process will help you:

• Reduce product defects
• Improve productivity
• Increase innovation
• Save costs
• Shorten time to market
• Pay down design debt
• Improve team collaboration, and more.

Leader: Jim Highsmith

Enabling Agile Project Management and Software Development

Cutter Consortium's Agile Enablement engagement provides your organization with experienced, hands-on assistance to jumpstart and guide your transition to agile methods. Led by Practice Director Jim Highsmith, Cutter's team of experts help you identify which agile practices - such as iterative product development, test-first design, project chartering sessions, pair programming, team collocation, onsite customers, sustainable work schedules, and others - will bring the greatest return-on-investment to your organization. Our goal: to enable you to implement agile software development and project management methods quickly and effectively, shorten your product development schedule, and increase the quality of the resultant product.

Our Approach

We help our clients implement agile methods by focusing on agile principles and traits - delivering customer value, embracing change, reflection, adaptation, etc. - and the basic project management model of envisioning the project, planning the overall project and next iteration, working with the pilot team during the iteration in a knowledge transfer mode, and closing out the project at the end with an overall project retrospective. Cutter's approach mirrors that of our overall philosophy with respect to IT, namely that we do not promote a single strategy but instead customize our approach to fit a client's specific situation.

Cutter Consortium's world-renown Senior Consultants and best-in-class coaches and facilitators have the experience and skills - technical, process and interpersonal - to help you determine your best course of action. We'll fine-tune the right combination of training and coaching of your entire team, from project managers to developers, testers to users to ensure that your organization can succeed using agile methods. We are well equipped to customize agile templates, borrowing from the best practices of a variety of methodologies and combine them with your existing processes to meet you ongoing requirements.

The Engagement

Cutter's Agile Enablement Engagement takes a 5-part approach:

1. Education. We offer two distinct introductions to the benefits of Agile; one customized for senior executives and one for your implementation staff.

2. Assessment: Cutter's agile assessment process includes both quantitative and qualitative components. After conducting a benchmark comparison of your existing projects and interviewing key stakeholders, we'll assess your readiness based on:

   • Business drivers
   • Project successes and concerns
   • Basic understanding of existing metrics such as defect levels, productivity, and customer satisfaction
   • Current methodologies being used

3. Creating an Agile Vision. We'll help you identify and clarify an end-state vision of what your agile approach should look like, pinpointing your core values and relating them to the benefits that an agile approach brings. We'll also help you set the objectives for your agile initiative and determine a realistic time schedule for agile implementation. Then we'll help you sell this vision to both key decision makers and your technical staff.

4. Determination of Specific Solution Components: Our methodology recommendations cover Product Development, Project Management, Software Development, and Portfolio Management. In addition, we deliver practice/skill recommendations in Technical Practices, Project Management Practices, and Collaboration Practices

5. Action Plan: Lastly, together we'll set an action plan, including:

   1. Identifying which projects should go agile
   2. Checkpoints for determining implementation success
   3. Create implementation teams that are a mix of your staff and appropriate Cutter Senior Consultants and/or coaches.
   4. Determine the correct mix of coaching, training, and consulting required based on your goals and budget.
   5. Create a three-tier action plan to meet short, intermediate, and long range objectives.

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.