Sometimes reporters only want a quick opinion or reaction from emergn™ executives for their stories when there's really much more to be said. We can describe the growth and background for emergn’s use of agile and lean methodologies, along with details of our successful partnerships with a range of enterprises. Contact pr@emergn.com for more information. Want to be kept up to date in real-time? Subscribe to our feed.
Let the Fun Begin! As children, we learn through play. Because play is so much fun, it creates a virtuous circle where we play and learn. As adults, with the help of educational or “learning” games, the lucky ones among us find ourselves playing to learn once again. Judging by the popularity of learning games, we can still learn a lot through play. For some, it may even be the best way to learn.
The CEO of a financial services company had blocked off a day to take his management team offsite for a dedicated session focused on using agile to run the organization. After devoting the first half of the day to understanding agile practices and principles, the balance of the day focused on taking the specific initiatives and goals of this financial services company and translating them into tangible stories. These stories could be used to populate the company’s new Kanban board, one of the tools they would use to begin applying what they learned.
emergn™, a global professional services and business agility firm, today announced that the company is launching its lean and agile training series, emergnEducation™, in North America. After strong success in Europe, emergnEducation will offer a rich curriculum based on emergn’s unique perspective on lean and agile training. Rather than solely providing training on the basics of lean and agile processes, each course will focus on continuous learning and improvement and practical application for attendees to deliver meaningful change and improvement to their organization.
Organizations practicing agile software development often talk about being “lean.” Yet since lean is most often associated with manufacturing environments, its applicability to software development can create some confusion. Are they both methodologies? Philosophies? Something in between?
There are few things greater than the pride one can take away in learning from their own mistakes and then not repeating them. One better would be to learn from others' mistakes and avoid complication altogether. And, naturally, endlessly accurate, infallible precognition ability would top the list, but unfortunately, few of us were born graced with the gift of incredible foresight. Unless of course you happen to be Nostradamus, but Nostradamus is a fairly controversial topic in and of itself.
Whether you're a tester, developer or a regular Joe, you are probably familiar with the headache of booking flights and air travel in general. Software testers and developers often fall victim to similar deployment and iteration issues. Everyone just wants to get off the ground in the quickest, least stressful way while still enjoying the journey.
The notion of agile software development has gained near-universal mind share in the eight years since the Agile Manifesto was penned. Meanwhile, adoption keeps ramping up as more organizations look to reap the benefits of getting usable software on time and within budget.
Minimum market feature set. That defines the baseline to satisfy the needs of a project. The automotive industry uses this to create a base model of a car, and then provides a list of options that can be added on to customize the car and give it more capabilities. This is true for software development as well.
But a potential pitfall, according to Alex Adamopoulos of agile project management company emergn™, is that as iterative development facilitates change throughout the process, the thinking is that the project must be delivered “fully loaded.” But understanding the minimum market feature set, he said, actually defines the true business value of the project, and eliminates waste of both manpower and money to deliver the finished product. — David Rubinstein
This previously recorded webinar with emergn™ is now available here
The original event was broadcast on:
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2009
Time: 2pm ET US/ 11am PT US / 7pm UK
Duration: One Hour
On Demand Webcast: Click Here
This previously recorded webinar with emergn provides an open and in-depth discussion that covered the following topics:
You’ll also learn how one Fortune 50 company began their agile journey and embarked on a substantial initiative to align their development efforts with real business value.
http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=162561&s=1&k=09EF3881CB52716E1DE52736C82DFDAE
You can view the event archive at the link provided above.
Important: System Setup & Compatibility Check - Test the computer that you will be using and make sure you have the minimum technical requirements to attend this event. Allow sufficient time prior to viewing the event for this test. Test at http://event.on24.com/clients/help/index.html
Agile Journal editor Alex Peake spoke to emergn™ CEO Alex Adamopoulos about how their new unified sourcing model brings agility beyond development into the business sourcing process itself.
Alex Adamopoulos is CEO of emergn, a sourcing strategy and Agile consultancy. Alex has more than 20 years of hands-on industry experience leading global organizations into new stages of growth, and enabling better alignment of strategy, sales, and delivery practices.
Recently, I spoke with Alex Adamopoulos, CEO and founder of emergn™ about his company’s new agile development transition consultancy program, AgilePMO. In these remarks from our interview, Adamopoulos offers advice on agile development process adoption and his views on agile.
emergn, is a new company, but Adamopoulos’ experience in the software service field is extensive. He is a 20-year veteran and an active blogger.
“For me, agile goes far beyond being a software development methodology. I view it as a culture and a transformation program,” Alex Adamopoulos founder and CEO of emergn™, told me recently. This point of view led to emergn’s creation of AgilePMO, a unified sourcing framework for companies using agile principles. AgilePMO was released last week and emergn expects long-lasting industry results to follow. AgilePMO’s focus is on organizational issues as well as integration and implementation. It differs from traditional templates and kick the box contracts, said Adamopoulos, in that the established relationship is continuous. This is not a one-time fix all.
