“ITIL is in fact similar in that it is a set of Best Practices. There is a sort of double misconception around that ITIL is documentation top heavy and Agile is documentation lite — and neither is true. I think the philosophy of both is that you need to understand your risks to have proper governance. So you do not need to become top heavy with stuff that will be of no use in the future. But neither do you want to become anarchic, producing stuff that nobody understands.”
Faster innovation
All of this is increasingly important, Hearsum says, because there is now a demand for change and innovation at a much faster rate than in the past. “I don’t think that necessarily means that methodologies change necessarily just that they need to be adapted to the current ways of working. You can do things with ITIL in an Agile way.”
He goes on to suggest that change management and project management and governance and risk are in many respects converging. “Even today I think that almost everyone in ICT needs to understand project management to some degree. In a decade or two, I suspect everything will be delivered as a service and all of these disciplines will come together in service management and a business value chain.
“The relationship between business and IT has changed — in fact we really should not be talking of them as separate things because IT is now firmly part of the business,” Hearsum says. “Enterprise service management is a role that has to combine all of the strands because it is becoming totally pervasive across all area of the organisation and its activities.”
What we see and believe is that when you introduce Agile in a structured and mature way it has real value because you do integrate business and technology. Your stakeholders are comfortable because they understand what is going on. Certainly our experience over many years is that the most successful projects have clients who are thoroughly involved, Richard Power, SQS
Governance a barrier
The advent of Agile in software projects is significant in recent years in Ireland, according to Richard Power, head of consultancy services in software testing specialists SQS. “There is still, however, something of a myth that good governance is a barrier to Agile where you are trying to get into a fluid state with everybody involved. So governance is seen as bringing in gateways and restrictions and silos. Yet what we see and believe is that when you introduce Agile in a structured and mature way it has real value because you do integrate business and technology. Your stakeholders are comfortable because they understand what is going on. Certainly our experience over many years is that the most successful projects have clients who are thoroughly involved.”
That is one of the things that Agile proponents would point to as well, Power says. “Then you can have that quick pivot, change of direction, because there is agreement within the project team and the overall is within the parameters. Another angle on that suggests that an Agile team can only be truly effective when there is a business decision maker on the team. If the client representative is not empowered or not capable of making a decision the Agile approach can actually fail.”
More challenging
Contrasting at a high level with PRINCE 2 and other traditional methodologies, Power points out that they tend to have very obvious gates and governance becomes very easy because there are very clear steps. “Governance in the Agile space becomes a good deal more challenging, I think. You just don’t have those obvious gates between one phase and another and so the various models are more difficult to implement while at the same time following appropriate disciplines.”
“Agile is really from a different culture. What was the project manager becomes the ‘scrum master’ type of leader, even referred to as ‘servant leadership’ — the role is to remove all the barriers, distractions and politics from the work of the team. That is really a different mind-set. That is where perhaps I am sceptical,” Power says. “Experience suggests that quite often in a project there comes a time when the leader has to crack a whip, lay down the law or however you might put it.”
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers