Agile Down Under

I just got back from a grueling trip to Australia. I was on the ground for four days. In that time, I visited Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with days packed with public seminars and customer visits. While IT and application development are a smaller community in Australia, I was very happy to see the interest and level of adoption.

While in Melbourne I had the good fortune to speak with Lorraine Pauls Longhurst from Computerworld. We had a great conversation about some of the basics of agile and teams struggles around agile adoption. Given that this was in the early phases of the global financial meltdown, so our conversation naturally turned in this direction. Lorraine asked me point-blank - How will agile help organizations in times like these?

Wow. Here was my chance to solve the financial crisis. Move aside McCain and Obama!

Joking aside, there were some practical things we discussed. I asserted that agile and lean are clearly aligned with helping organizations through times like these. Firstly, they make sure that you are focused on delivering customer value. This can and should be extended into evaluating your existing projects, products and applications and ensuring the maintenance investment is producing adequate ROI. Also, effective agile approaches get value to customers early and often. Which easier to get buy-in from our customers - especially when they are under duress.


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