Organised by BCS Business Change, BCS Quality and BCS SPA specialist groups.
Synopsis
There are many international (mainly USA based) versions of ‘Business Agile’ for over 20 years. The versions vary a great deal. None of them are dominant. All of them have researched track opinion records in improving organisational management, compared to previous methods (DavidFRico.com).
My own agile methods (Evo, Planguage, Spec QC, Impact Estimation tables) have been applied mostly in the IT area, but also for decades outside of IT, in improving real organisations and non-IT levels of organisations. The best of these Business Agile methods clearly refer to stakeholders, value objectives, and metrics. But like most of the IT and Enterprise Architecture methods, they are in my opinion at the same primitive level of requirements found in IT (not much above User Stories), and at the same primitive level of evaluating strategies as the Enterprise Architecture (not systematic and quantitative), and with almost no mention of powerful Quality Assurance methods (we are not talking testing, by another name).
I do in fact have a framework to offer. But clearly some of the Business Agility Methods, for example those used by Rick Dove in Military Suppliers (Parshift.com), are far more complete for their purposes, than mine. They consider all the necessary governance in practical detail.
So although my initial intent was to propose a complete Business / Organisation / Enterprise level Agility method, I decided that I should rather offer my sharp engineering improvements, to the basic processes (objectives, strategies, value flow control, QA). And then hope that mature agile enterprises would like to adopt my ideas, either at the level of the methods supplier, or the organisations that are using Agile as a business management framework.
My experience, worldwide for decades, and my 2020 research into the subject, leave me with the clear impression, based on plenty of independent research and reports, that the methods I can offer, are clearly superior, in cost-effectiveness, to the ones actually in use. I can offer better organisational systems engineering, it seems, and no-one has yet pointed out equal-or-superior (in effectiveness) options. You should make up your own mind, for your own purposes.
So, I’ll present my ideas. I will offer free supporting literature, and hope that people who are ready for the next step, and organisationally agile enough to make improvements, and that they can make the world a better place.
I never liked the name ‘business agility’ and I am not exclusively concerned with ‘businesses (and profitability, and shareholders). As Dr. Deming said ’survival is not compulsory’. Businesses, which do not compete well, will die out.
I am really worried about the other organisations. National Governments, Local Government, Multinationals (from Google, some Banks to EU), Internationals (UN, WHO), Charities, Institutes (like World Economic Forum), Universities, Medical Research and services. I have seen, and documented in detail, their very bad habits of managing objectives / strategies / QA / Value Delivery (See my free Sustainability Planning 2019, Governeering 2020). This is scary. They squander a lot of public money (not just on IT!) and they are very ineffective in value delivery. We are talking life and death, and your pandemic health, here.
About the speaker
Tom Gilb
Tom was born in California 1940, lived in the UK 1956-58, Norway 1958 to present. Joined IBM 1958. Consulted for a very wide variety of organisations, and managed to influence some of them in interesting and well documented ways.
Tom is an Honorary Fellow of BCS. See Gilb.com for more detail.
Here are some free publications for those who want to see the detail: (they contain references to many other free digital publications)
Our events are for adults aged 16 years and over.
This event is brought to you by: Business Change specialist group, BCS Quality specialist group and BCS SPA specialist group
