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Ivis consultants are working with a major Fortune 500 company helping them to transform their software development processes.

What were their pain points?

A vast IT budget spread over literally thousands of projects
These projects came back each year to renew their budget but only relatively few of them could quantify the business benefit they would deliver. Many projects merely had a very long backlog of change requests.
Business priorities - such as introducing new products, addressing competitive weaknesses or opportunities, unifying IT systems in different companies/division, etc. - simply could not be scheduled quickly. Requirements gathering could take many months and then competing with existing backlogs for implementation resource often resulted in unacceptable delays or simply infeasibility of responding.

The company has instituted a radical change program which Ivis consultants are directly involved in defining and implementing. The thousands of projects have been rationalized into a few tens of "programs", each addressing business areas prioritized by the board. 90-day cycles are mandated across the board for all projects and programs, and these cycles start with an intense workshop to transform a prioritized set of business problems into prototype solutions. The agreed solution is then deployed to the business within the 90 days. Reviews following each cycle measuring the tangible business benefits delivered in each iteration.

Such a process is only feasible by adopting within the 90-day iterations the kinds of agile practices that Ivis Technologies use and promote. These include:

Priority driven process and priority-based planning
Timeboxed development with work burndown monitoring
Continuous integration (automated build, test, deploy)
Test-first or test driven development
Agile modeling and development
User/business involvement throughout the cycle
Rapid feedback loops between development and users

Our consultants are practiced in training and mentoring on these techniques, but more than that, these are the techniques we are also using in our own development, and with other clients.

Larger organizations do well to consider the implications of simply scaling up standard agile techniques such as XP or FDD to multiple teams without considering the impact across the organization, particularly with regards monitoring and control. This is one of the key motivations for Ivis's xProcess product which is specifically designed for multiple teams applying agile techniques, especially priority-based planning. Our consultants are well-versed in this product and can provide configuration support and training where teams are using this process improvement environment.

Contact Ivis regarding Agile Consulting Professional Services.