Alan Moran

educa.ch · Digital Portfolio & Innovation

In an often overlooked aspect of agile, Alan Moran, Managing Director of the Swiss based Institute for Agile Risk Management, explains how agile practices contribute to the bottom line of your organisation.

Agile is an established methodology used to cope with change and uncertainty. It has proved popular in product development and project management across a wide range of sectors. Understanding the impact of Agile on the bottom line and how this affects the financial management and appraisal of projects is therefore of central importance to executive...

This chapter considers the major elements of agile project management as perceived through the lens of the DSDM Agile Project Framework (which is related to DSDM Agile Project Management though there are significant differences). The introduction of this framework forms the basis of discussions elsewhere in this book concerning how wider matters in...

When engaging in matters of strategic importance, agile organisations require an action oriented perspective that is based on market dynamism driven by the realities of the extended enterprise, globalisation, mass customisation, digitalisation and innovation. Accordingly, the classical strategic management approaches based on market and industrial...

In spite of the economic claims made for Agile (e.g., enhanced return on investment, cost risk management), financial and accounting aspects of Agile are a relatively neglected topic (e.g., advice on accounting for capital and operational expenditure, pricing models). Yet value delivery and economic risk mitigation lie at the heart of Agile one of...

The psychological make-up of agile teams has been the subject of relatively little research in spite of the emphasis on humanism and emotional intelligence in agile management. Given the clear socio-technical character of the agile process, it is important to establish a broad understanding of its implications for teams and their performance. It wo...

Configuration management has sometimes been considered an ancillary discipline within the agile community in spite of its widespread use within the IT sector where it underpins practices such as continuous integration and automated deployment processes. Without configuration management it becomes impossible to effectively manage change, support exp...

Typically an organisation is involved in multiple undertakings some of which can be aggregated together to serve a common vision whilst others represent disparate or opportunistic activities. Combined they enable the transition of an organisation from its current state to a desired future state which inevitably gives rise to tensions between tactic...

Governance is concerned with how decision-making within programmes and their projects is conducted. Embedded in this view is the assurance that the necessary project management capability exists and is sufficient for the needs of the organisation and that at an individual project level resources are being deployed in an effective and efficient mann...

Organisational theory embodies a wide range of concerns, though its primary focus is on the operating characteristics and structure of the enterprise. On account of its prevailing influence, it is important first to understand organisational culture and how this impinges on and is influenced by the adoption of Agile practices. This naturally leads...

Classical approaches to solution development envisage quality and testing in terms of completed solutions that are to be assessed for suitability resulting in either transition to production or return for rework and amendments. Such processes possess gatekeeper characteristics and use existing specifications as their grounds for assessment. In an a...

Though explicitly embedded into the DSDM Agile Project Framework, risk management in most agile methodologies remains a passive and implicit activity that can be misdirected and often misunderstood. It is telling that whilst most solution developers have little difficulty explaining which features they are working on (e.g., requirements) or to what...

This book examines agile approaches from a management perspective by focusing on matters of strategy, implementation, organization and people. It examines the turbulence of the marketplace and business environment in order to identify what role agile management has to play in coping with such change and uncertainty. Based on observations, personal...

Looking back at the origins of agile software development we provide an overview of its unique blend of supple practices and vivid cultural facets that contrast so sharply with the plan-driven world of Waterfall methodologies. We discuss the iterative and incremental nature of agility and introduce a tool, agile charting, that can be used to facili...

We start out by defining what we mean by risk in the project context and explore cultural attitudes towards risk which constitute an important element of agile risk management. From there we review a number of risk management frameworks that span the domains of project and enterprise risk management distilling their similarities into a generic risk...

We argue that risk management in agile projects remains a passive and implicit activity that can be misdirected and often misunderstood. It is telling that whilst most developers have little difficulty explaining which features they are working (e.g., user stories) or to what level of quality they should be completed (e.g., definitions of done), fe...

We take a glimpse at the growing interest in agility applied to the enterprise where projects assume greater dimensions in terms of team sizes, geodispersion and complexity. We reflect on the contribution in this respect of the frameworks already discussed in this book (e.g., DSDM) together with some new arrivals (e.g., DAD, SAFe). Although we ackn...

Having covered the agile risk management process in the Chapter“Agile Risk Management” we now turn our attention to our three core methodologies (XP, Scrum and DSDM) to illustrate its application. For each methodology we trace its background describing key features in detail, summarize it in terms of the methodological dimensions we introduced in C...

This work is the definitive guide for IT managers and agile practitioners. It elucidates the principles of agile risk management and how these relate to individual projects. Explained in clear and concise terms, this synthesis of project risk management and agile techniques is illustrated using the major methodologies such as XP, Scrum and DSDM. Al...

We show that for certain compact right topological groups, r(G), the strong operator topology closure of the image of the right regular representation of G in L(H ), where H = L2(G), is a compact topological group and introduce a class of representations, R , which effectively transfers the representation theory of r(G) over to G. Amongst the group...

We introduce in this paper the notion of a normal system for a compact, Hausdorff, right topological group, G. This generalizes the notion of a strong normal system as introduced in [7], in which it was shown that closed subgroups of compact right topological groups with dense topological centres possess strong normal systems and have Haar me...