As I noted in a previous blog, change is in the nature of our business, whether you are talking about pioneer coders (like Margaret Hamilton, the behind-the-scenes techie who helped make possible the first landing on the moon ) or the latest wrinkles in mobility or JavaScript, everything we do in this business is about embracing and leveraging change.
Agility and lean development is an obvious corollary to embracing change. You can’t embrace or lead change if your team and your organization are inflexible, slow, or encumbered by out-of-date technology. In fact, Forrester Research recently released a “playbook” focusing on how organizations can move to agile and lean development methods. They describe the key steps as:
- Empower a strategic team focused on bringing change;
- Re-align software delivery with the business;
- Introduce agile processes that focus on people; and,
- Instill the right architectures and tools to support flexible and responsive processes.
That sounds to me a lot like what we preach. Progress Pacific, for example, empowers teams to make changes while facilitating close cooperation with business. And it supports processes that are inherently agile while providing architecture and tools needed to deliver flexibility and responsiveness in the applications themselves.
By itself, Pacific can’t make your team agile but it can certainly help it get there. And, we agree with Forrester; agility is the name of the game!
Karen Tegan Padir
Karen Tegan Padir is the president of the Application Development and Deployment Business Unit at Progress, reporting to President and Chief Executive Officer Phil Pead. Padir, a 20-year software industry veteran, is responsible for the strategy and growth of Progress application development assets including Telerik, Modulus, Rollbase and the Pacific Platform.