by Jenny Boronyak | Sep 10, 2014 | Agile, Uncategorized |
When the term “agile” comes up in a conversation these days, the mind often jumps to agile software development. But there’s so much more to being agile than delivering software products iteratively and incrementally. If our planning or change strategies aren’t agile, we can forget about being able to deliver the maximum amount of business value possible to our customers. Our entire organization must be agile in order to be able to “keep our finger on the pulse” and rapidly adapt to meet today’s demands. On top of being agile, the most successful organizations out there are also lean mean machines, capable of effectively managing the portfolio to avoid surprises and respond to threats quickly and efficiently. In our webinar last month, The Path to Business Agility, Enfocus Solutions’ CEO John Parker discussed the four components that make up a lean agile business: Enterprise Agile Delivery The agile organization must have the ability to deliver products and services iteratively and incrementally based on discovered and validated customer needs. Agile software delivery is usually the first place organizations start when adopting agile. Many organizations have yet to move onto implementing agile in other areas of the organization, and limit their focus to the responsibilities of the agile team. In reality, the agile team only makes up one part of Enterprise Agile Delivery, and Enterprise Agile Delivery only makes up one of four fundamentals that must be addressed for the organization to be considered agile. In the Lean Business Agility Framework, Enterprise Agile Delivery is achieved via three key elements: Agile Teams (Scrum or Kanban)—Support day-to-day work of self-organized teams (using...
by Jenny Boronyak | May 2, 2014 | ITIL and Service Design, Uncategorized |
When we attended Knowledge14 in San Francisco earlier this week, one thing we noticed is how amazingly far organizations have gotten in adopting IT Service Management (ITSM). But while it does seem organizations have caught onto the fact that moving towards ITSM provides a lot of value, many have still not yet adopted or placed enough emphasis on the ITIL practices of Service Strategy and Service Design. This is a huge mistake, as ITIL offers valuable guidelines to service providers on the best ways to design and maintain services for the business. Image from ITIL Service Design One of those guidelines is to create a Service Design Package (SDP). It seems that many new service providers either neglect the SDP or create one that’s lacking in all the necessary elements. However, creating an SDP ensures your services are designed well, and according to the authors of ITIL Service Design “the better and more careful the design, the better the solution taken into live operation,” so creating a SDP is not a step you want to skip The Service Design Package (SDP) follows a service through its lifecycle from initial proposal to retirement. It contains all the information required to manage an IT service. The SDP specifies the requirements from the viewpoint of the client (not IT) and defines how these are actually fulfilled from a technical and organizational point of view. When created properly, SDPs bring a lot of value to the business. A SDP… Improves the quality of services Improves decision-making Makes implementation of new or changed services easier Improves alignment of services to the business Makes service...
by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 17, 2014 | Agile, ITIL and Service Design, Uncategorized |
Join us for two of the newest webinars in our Enfocus Solutions webinar series! Agile Business Transformation May 15th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) Agile has become mainstream for developing software. Organizations that have adopted agile have seen improvements in quality, cycle time, and customer satisfaction. Standish Group research shows that agile projects are three times more successful than traditional plan driven projects. However using Agile Development practices does not make an agile organization. Frequent delivery of software provides little value if the software cannot be deployed because of rigid release and change management processes. Another significant challenge facing enterprises is how to coordinate agile teams across multiple projects in multi-disciplined environments. Companies are appointing agile coaches to individual projects, but there is little or no company-wide coordination. In addition, little has been done to help transform the business to be able to respond more rapidly to change. Agile transformation requires focus on four key areas: Agile Discovery Agile Delivery DevOps Agile Business Change In this webinar, John Parker will address these four topics with heavy emphasis on Agile Discovery and Agile Business Change. He will also discuss how BAs and PMs will need to transform to operate in the agile environment. Target Audience: PMOs, Agile Project Managers, Agile Business Analysts, Enterprise Portfolio Managers, and Product Owners Agile & ITIL June 10th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) At first Agile and ITIL seem at odds because of the rigid release and change management process of ITIL and the rapid delivery of software in agile. However, the two frameworks are actually...
