What has changed in the world of Agile? Agile has now grown up. Although there are still many Agile teams producing great solutions in relatively simple environments, there is an increasing demand for the use of Agile in what are recognised as more challenging circumstances. Since its launch in 1995, DSDM has been a lone Agile voice promoting the use of an Agile way of managing projects in the corporate world, both for solutions which are built using IT, and for business (non-IT) projects. Over the next decades, other Agile approaches have emerged, but unlike DSDM they provided little or no focus on corporate, scalable Agile until very recently.
DSDM’s launch of Agile Project Management (AgilePM) in collaboration with APMG three years ago has helped reinforce the message that “Agile” and “Control”, and “Agile” and “Project” can co-exist perfectly happily alongside one another – a very welcome message in the corporate world which urgently needs to encompass the Agile way of working.
Another need that has surfaced recently is the option to blend Agile approaches together. This may be because the in-house established Agile approach is lacking in some areas and needs bolstering to make it more scaleable, or simply because an organisation wants to select elements from a number of Agile approaches. But in the complex corporate world, it is not just about blending Agile with Agile, it is also often necessary or mandatory to link Agile into corporate processes such as Prince2 (TM), and formal quality or regulatory processes.
The Agile Project Framework – the next evolution of DSDM – builds on DSDM’s longstanding experience of Agile in the corporate world. It has been simplified in some areas to enable easier links to other Agile approaches and now concentrates on the core knowledge that is applicable to any member of a DSDM team, whether in a Solution Development Team role, a Project role or a Supporting role.
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Video producer: http://www.agileconference.org/