Agile 2.0

Israel Gat | 10:00 – 11:15

Abstract

Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is itself dramatically changing. What we are now witnessing is the emergence of Agile 2.0. Three rapidly converging trends are driving the emergence of Agile 2.0:

  • Markets are becoming hyper-segmented;
  • Markets are also becoming fleetingly transient; and
  • The value chains that serve the markets are dramatically different from yesterday’s value chains.

Traditionally, the Agile movement responded to change by “merging” two strands — development and testing — at the team level. Agile 2.0 extends this single-level approach by simultaneously applying Agile principles at three tiers:

  1. The tier at which development, testing and operations merge
  2. The tier at which strategy and delivery merge
  3. The tier at which problem and solution merge

Agile 2.0 addresses the key challenge posed by “change is changing”: how to solve a problem when it is not understood well enough to produce a viable solution. Rapidly interlinked iterations at all three levels make it possible to substitute learning for planning. It’s through tight feedback loops in and amongst the three levels that the pace of learning accelerates to match the speed of change.

In this presentation, Cutter Fellow and Director of Cutter’s Agile practice, Israel Gat, will divulge the details you need to know about how to implement Agile 2.0 in your organization/company. You’ll get a blueprint for assessing and responding to the new realities of the competitive environment — without compromising the tried and true Agile tenets.

Speaker

Dr. Israel Gat is a Cutter Consortium Fellow and Director of the Agile Product & Project Management practice. He is recognized as the architect of the agile transformation at BMC Software where, under his leadership, Scrum users increased from zero to 1,000, resulting in nearly three times faster time to market than industry average and 20%-50% improvement in team productivity. Among other accolades for leading this transition, Dr. Gat was presented with an Innovator of the Year Award from Application Development Trends in 2006.

Dr. Gat’s executive career spans top technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Digital, and EMC. He has led the development of products such as BMC Performance Manager and Microsoft Operations Manager, enabling the two companies to move toward next-generation system management technology. Dr. Gat is also well versed in growing smaller companies and holds advisory and venture capital positions for companies in new, high-growth markets.

Dr. Gat currently splits his time between consulting and writing. He focuses on technical debt, large-scale implementations of lean software methods, and devops. His e-book, The Concise Executive Guide to Agile, explains how the three can be tied together to form an effective software governance framework. Dr. Gat holds a PhD in computer science and an MBA. In addition to publishing with Cutter and the IEEE, he posts frequently at The Agile Executive and tweets as agile_exec. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.