Modern methods of delivery

I have been passionate about and working with agile methodologies for 10 years, and it’s this enthusiasm that I bring to my role as Head of Delivery at Tecknuovo. I’ve worked with clients in the private and public sectors to adopt agile ways of working and support a culture change.

What I’ve learnt? One size does not fit all.

When embarking on a digital transformation journey, it’s been acknowledged that it’s not only the technology, but also the people and process that need to change to digitally transform organisations and the products they deliver. Agile has a lot to offer but organisations need much more to succeed.

So, how can we, as agile practitioners and people responsible for change, go about choosing the right method that suits our context, our team and product that we’re building?

The answer isn’t simple, and it depends on a few factors.

Every organisation faces different challenges and has different needs. Based on my experience, the most common challenges are:

• Legacy systems and dependencies on suppliers
• Skills gap e.g. DevOps skills and capabilities
• Lack of product and/or service mindset
• Processes and governance that conflict with how delivery teams operate
• Lack of senior leadership support and buy-in

Therefore, an approach we need to follow should be based on values and principles rather than be prescribed by a method or framework we decide to adopt. Our delivery model should be adaptive, modular and method-agnostic so that we can practice agility and embrace its principles: collaboration with customers and users, iterative value delivery, transparency, experimentation or continuous improvement at every level.

We want the new ways of thinking, working and patterns (specific to our context) to emerge so that we can fully benefit from agile methods and embrace change.

When changing our behaviour and culture, we also need to apply human-centred design that puts people at the heart of everything we do. This starts with customers and/or users, through stakeholders, employees and other parties involved.

I’m going to be covering all of this in my talk at the “Agile, DevOps and Testing: New directions in methods and tools” conference organised by UNICOM. Come and join me for my talk where I am going to propose an approach that will help the new practices and ways of working emerge in any organisation or delivery team. This talk will delve into modern methods of delivery that I believe every organisation would benefit from without becoming dependent on one prescribed solution.