Agile is growing up, moving from being the sole domain of software development teams into the programme, portfolio and, ultimately, enterprise management domains.
"CEOs are repeatedly telling us that they are looking for greater business agility for their businesses to remain relevant in an ever-changing and increasingly demanding business environment," says IndigoCube MD Ziaan Hattingh. "To achieve increased business agility, it is necessary to instil agility into the entire organisation. Just improving the quality of software development on its own may well yield some productivity gains and cost savings, but by itself it will not achieve business agility."
Agile methodology is thus growing out of its software development-focused skin. And it's doing so through frameworks like the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which IndigoCube is adopting and bringing to the local market.
SAFe is a framework for applying Agile practices across an enterprise. Hattingh notes that it's early days and many organisations are not ready for SAFe yet, but that some of IndigoCube's customers are very interested already. To that end, IndigoCube has invested in certifying one of its team on SAFe. Jaco Viljoen is South Africa's first SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), having met the qualification criteria and completed the certification programme in Berlin, presented by SAFe creator Dean Leffingwell.
"IndigoCube is the first company certified to implement SAFe in South Africa," Viljoen says. "I'm the first SPC, and my certification qualifies me to implement SAFe, and train and certify SAFe Agilists and SAFe Practitioners."
IndigoCube is adopting SAFe as the foundation for most of its solutions going forward, says Hattingh, as well as partnering with Scaled Agile, the owner of SAFe.
Says Viljoen: "The first 10 years after the Agile Manifesto was released in 2001 has been around getting software development teams to be agile. The next 10 years will be about enterprise agility and we believe SAFe to be the most complete framework to enable this."
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