Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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The Government has made some progress in adopting Agile, but there is a long way to go. So says an update from the Institute for Government (IfG) on their report - System Error - from a year ago.

The IfG update report - System upgrade? The first year of the Government's ICT strategy - says that whilst the strategy commits the Government to use a more Agile approach, achieving its target of 50% of projects using Agile techniques by April 2013 will be extremely difficult. "Until agile approaches become the norm, we are likely to see further examples of major government IT projects that experience vast cost overruns and produce solutions that are out of date by the time they are delivered."

It seems to me that the Agile transition process for the UK Government is likely to take a number of years. Waterfall development and rigid procurement processes are so ingrained throughout Government departments, that moving to Agile will require more than setting targets and writing an ICT Strategy. This is a business change of major proportions.

We have seen some encouraging signs and there are projects that are using Agile. We're looking forward to helping to make further progress and reap the rewards of Agile for the UK tax payer!

I’ll add more shortly about some of the work we have been doing for a Government client using Agile.