Published on the 05/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

Enterprises which want to wring the most benefit from Agile processes and practices need to shift away from annual plans to more regular quarterly planning sessions…

Agile processes and practices are all about responding more rapidly to changing market conditions. Clinging to annual planning practices risks eroding some of its benefits according to Steve Demchuk, chief product owner and director of product management at Rally Software.

Demchuk, who has been visiting clients and prospects in Australia and New Zealand over the last fortnight, said it was imperative that enterprises “meet quarterly to check in on the vision and the product strategy to meet the vision”.

Not only did this “secret sauce” ensure that the business responded rapidly, but it also helped limit the schedule of work in progress.

However Demchuk acknowledged that fewer than a quarter of the organisations Rally dealt with had yet made the transition to quarterly planning.

He acknowledged that enterprise budgeting cycles were traditionally annual which tended to steer planning cycles, but Demchuk said there was no reason a business could not have annual budgets, broken down into quarterly planning phases.

There is a competitive advantage to switching said Demchuk as “the ones that have can go like wildfire”.

As to the progress that A/NZ business has made in adopting Agile and Lean practices, Demchuk said that it was roughly in line with what was happening in other markets, although very large US-based enterprises were leading the global pack.

For companies which have yet to take the plunge he recommended organisations pilot Agile approaches by identifying a project in a business which was already delivering significant benefit and then apply Agile as it should be possible to ratchet up the performance of that programme and quickly demonstrate the value of Agile.

But Demchuk warned that for the most value to be liberated, Agile had to break out of the technology ghetto and be embraced more widely across the business. That he said was driving the rapid growth of the dev-ops function in many businesses where development and operations were more tightly integrated.

Agile Australia, the annual gathering of the Agile faithful from across Australia and New Zealand will be hosted in Sydney in June, with workshops in Sydney and Melbourne book-ending the event. Further details can be found here.