According to surveys from several sources (Versionone (2011), Dr. Dobb’s Journal (2008), Shine Technologies (2003), the benefits of agile projects are:

• Higher productivity and lower cost,
• Improved employee engagement and job satisfaction,
• Faster time to market,
• Higher quality, and
• Improved stakeholder satisfaction.

Nevertheless, the Chief Information Officers to whom we have spoken want to be agile, but fear it can be interpreted as:

• Programming without knowing the requirements
• No documentation ever
• No management controls on costs
• No visibility on project progress
• An impossible change to realize
• And, and, and

An organizational change such as Agile needs solid support of the top management in order to be implemented sustainably. They want proof that their company will actually benefit from Agile. A Business Case that quantifies cost, benefits, and risks answers their questions in Euro and Cent. A reliable Business Case on Agile does cover all relevant aspects of such an endeavor, i.e. also the investment into various new soft- and hardware.
Therefore, we decided to put our project management expertise together with our let’s deliver philosophy and create a workshop to discuss making IT projects Agile. Since we know that Business Intelligence (BI) projects require a specific IT environment, we have included focus on the Agile BI.
Gloria Miller, maxmetrics, will introduce you to going agile and Johannes Ritter, Solutionmatrix, will hold a 30 minute presentation based on a recently finished project of a large scale implementation of Agile at a financial service provider.