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Agile Financial Times (Webinar)

Ian Brookes Cake Solutions

Today I dialled into a webinar on the financials of Agile given by Ian Brookes of Cake Solutions. A webinar gives you a window in which you can see the slides from the presentation and hear audio from the presentation. I worked quite well, but the audio was flaky at times.

I enjoyed the presentation, its content and Ian’s style. Here are some of the things Ian covered.

Ian started off by running through what Agile is and pointing out that it doesn’t cost any less than traditional software development processes such as waterfall. The added value is the fact that it delivers what the business needs, in contrast to traditional processes which can (sometimes) deliver on budget and on time, but usually don’t deliver what is required by the business. He also pointed out that Agile excels at delivering the most valuable features, rather than a lot of features that are unlikely to be used.

Ian went on to explain how the Agile estimation process works, including planning poker as he described the makeup of Agile teams. He pointed out that BAs should be involved throughout the project, otherwise there is a criminal waste of knowledge. Ian then went on to point out the flaws in Waterfall and compared it contractually to Agile. Agile has a more pay as you go feel with much better visibility and encourages communication, collaboration and trust. Ian told us how Agile can prevent projects from failing and about values and the human side of agile.

The final part of the presentation had all the numbers and showed how Agile can really reap financial benefits.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the end.

Comments

  1. Hi Paul. As much as I would love to take the credit for the talk you have kindly bloged about, it was Ian Brookes, Cake's Non-exec Director who gave the talk. Glad you enjoyed it. We will be publishing it as a podcast in the next few days to download from iTunes to catch up on the bit you missed at the end.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Guy, all I can say is you sound very alike! Thanks though, I've updated the post as you can see.

    ReplyDelete

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