Agile Leadership – Challenges in Agile Adoption

Harvey Starns provided an enthusiastic presentation covering a variety of areas of adopting agile to the Scotland branch on 25 May 2017 in Edinburgh . The presentation focused on why agile should be adopted, common adoption techniques and top tips. Harvey provided an explanation of the benefits of adopting agile, the principle of building the project around people and using the working software as the primary measure of progress.

The key messages from the evening were that anyone who follows the principles can be agile. Agile does not like methodologies, instead agile values people over process.

The presentation went onto cover areas including scaled agile and policy versus user needs and common adoption challenges before finishing with some top tips including becoming bullet proof, starting with the basics and never to combine waterfall with agile to form Wagile!

About the presenter:

Harvey Starns has several years’ experience working in IT, enabling change in both the public service and more recently the private sector. Experience in both waterfall and agile programmes delivering change in the public sector Harvey lead the adoption of agile practises into the Skills Funding Agency with the emergence of GDS and the move to digital Services by default in the public sector. 

Erin Slater, Secretary, Scotland Branch