Agile Development Blog

On Thursday, March 19th, Dave West from Forrester Research and I will be doing a live webinar titled, “Scaling Agility with Lean: Proven Methods of Operational Efficiency.” It is part of a webinar series regarding “Using Agile to Cut Development Costs.” Our own Jean Tabaka and Global Logic’s Johnny Scarborough did the first webinar titled “Realizing the Promise of Agile: Creating Leaner, Meaner and Faster Product Development” and it is available via recording by registering at this same site.

In this week’s webinar, I am going to share a set of models that I  keep being asked about. These slides show the changes that happen in the enterprise stage gate model as your Agile adoption moves up and matures in the organization. To hear the explanation behind these slides and see Dave West’s work on Lean, please join us on the webinar.  The full slide deck will be available after the webinar.

Not to steal all of my thunder, but there are two things that interesting about this transition.

1. The Agile stage gates of 3.1/4.1 actually provide more governance control than the old gates.
2. The first and last gate are not going away in large organizations anytime soon. You just don’t start projects without budget and you do not make a gold master for production without blessing from operations or overall system testing.

Lastly, Dave’s observations about how these stage gate models require a Lean organization approach, should make for a great conversation. I hope you will join us.