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From Here to Agility

From Here to Agility

Study after study indicates that agile methodologies produce better results in software development and project management. So why have so few CIOs adopted them?

The Alignment Add

As Martin's and Dury's stories show, agile project methods demand continuous dialogue between the business and IT. Collocating the business and IT team members engenders a kinship that's usually absent in traditional software development.

"They're on the ride with you," says Ajay Waghray, Verizon Wireless's CIO of the Midwest US area. "If something is not going right, they're partnering with you right there."

CIOs who have adopted agile methods say that changing their relationships with business stakeholders can have some surprising results. Waghray recalls recent conversations with key operations and marketing executives in which he used a more agile approach. "I would tell them on the call: 'I don't want any requirements. What do you want? Just tell me, and we'll talk about it'," he says. The executives asked if they should write down what they wanted. "And I would say: 'No, no, no. Don't give me requirements.'" The approach, he says, "was foreign to people".

Verizon Wireless's VZ Navigator product, which provides users with turn-by-turn, voice-supported directions on their mobile devices and has become one of the company's most popular mobile services, was heavily agile-influenced. Waghray's team consisted of stakeholders from IT, sales, customer care, marketing, training and finance. The team's main focus, Waghray says, was to develop the "simplest complete" solution right away, and then build upon that to make better solutions. "The reason it was successful was that the [agile] methodology encouraged constant communication and alignment across all stakeholders, leading to parallel development of not only the IT solution but also of training documentation, test cases, external and internal interface validation and development, and user communication to get them ready for launch," he says.

To many of the businesspeople on the team, the results were shocking. They told Waghray that this project should have taken three times as long as it did, which was roughly eight weeks from start to finish. According to Waghray, the VZ Navigator project "made a significant and immediate impact on the bottom line and it has now enabled an organizational capability to do this with similar products". It is "a culture and timing change", Waghray says of the process, "but I have never got more accolades from a business project".

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