Project Consulting Group helps organizations jumpstart or continue their Agile journey. We provide Agile consultants for your staff augmentation needs as well as Agile management consulting services for organizational assessments, roadmaps, transformation and scalability. PCG has practiced Agile since the inception of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) – Agile Modeling concepts in 2002.
What is Agile?
Agile is a philosophy encompassing multiple frameworks (e.g. Crystal, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Lean, Scrum, Scrumban) that share a common set of values and principles. These frameworks are differentiated by their practical applications and approach to implementation.
Agile promotes a cooperative and collaborative effort between core teams, leaders, and user communities to provide continuous delivery of products, software or services. Its structure embraces changing business needs, and measures progress and success through the production of well-designed and working products. At the same time, closely managed product backlogs and technical debt decisions ensure the ultimate business goals and objectives are met. Agile teams strive to maintain a consistent and sustainable pace while frequently reflecting on how to become more efficient and effective. Common Agile/Scrum functions include:
- Acceptance Criteria
- ATDD, BDD, TDD
- Backlog Grooming
- Burndown Charts
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Daily Scrum
- Definition of Done
- Product Backlog
- Product Owner
- Retrospective Reviews
- Refactoring
- Scaled Agile Framework
- Scaling
- Scrum of Scrums
- Scrum Master
- Sprints
- Sprint Backlog
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Reviews
- User Stories
- Velocity
Is Agile Right for your Company?
Experienced Agile organizations typically have notable success in delivering value to the customer, although it is important for new adopters to walk-before-running. A company should be open to continuous team interaction, increased stakeholder involvement, simplifying process and documentation, evolving requirements, and embracing business change, or else the initiative will likely fail.
Implementing Agile practices not only impacts the development teams, it also requires a new mindset and approach to governance, management, infrastructure, and operations. Organizational and team structure, project types, complexity, risk landscape/tolerance, and stakeholder location/availability are all factors to consider when choosing an Agile framework.
How can PCG help?
Project Consulting Group delivers best-in-class Agile consulting services tailored to fit your organization’s needs. We bring an energized, experienced staff with the knowledge to fill critical Agile roles such as Scrum Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Business Analysts and Quality Assurance Analysts.
Our Agile management consulting division covers services related to Agile organizational adoption, transformation, and scaling initiatives. PCG will help solve your most difficult challenges with our established methods and industry leading experience.
Contact PCG today at 1.800.731.7153 to schedule a complimentary Agile discovery work-session.
Agile Assessment and Roadmap
Project Consulting Group supports organizations who are ramping up Agile discussions or want to improve their current Agile capabilities. Whether in an inception or implementation phase, Agile success depends on a deep understanding of your challenges and opportunities. Our consulting team will perform an assessment and develop a well-defined roadmap for completing your Agile mission.
- Evaluate - Collaborate with key stakeholders to perform current-state assessment of your organizational readiness to adopt or improve agile capabilities.
- Analyze – Identify and document current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your agile implementation or improvement effort.
- Report – Provide a maturity score, phased roadmap, and actionable recommendations.
Agile Transformation
Project Consulting Group is passionate about the difference high performance agile teams can make. We facilitate transformation from traditional methods to an Agile framework. Agile transformation requires a mind-set change that many organizations may find challenging to apply if not executed properly. Instead of attempting to roll out Agile transformation through the entire organization simultaneously, PCG drives Agile success through a gradual and sustainable implementation.
- Plan – Prepare the organization’s leadership through training and mentorship. Facilitate the organization of agile teams.
- Train – Educate the roles and teams on the agile values, principles and associated framework. Incorporate train-the-trainer strategies where applicable.
- Coach/Catalyst - Prepare the team(s) for high-performance results while reducing the initial friction, tension, and stress due to change.
Agile Scaling
Project Consulting Group helps companies scale their agile capabilities across multi-team products, platforms, and organizational areas. We solve the problems that many organizations face; we relieve tension between how agile teams operate and how the rest of the organization is run. PCG endorses multiple scaling frameworks in support of cross-team alignment/collaboration/delivery including SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprises), Nexus (Agile framework to scale Scrum), and LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum).
- Define and Structure – Understand the organizational needs and identify the most appropriate scaling framework. Review pros/cons across scaling methods and gain organizational alignment.
- Plan – Create the implementation plan to support the agile scaling framework (e.g. change agent training, value-stream identification, release structures). Create roadmap, activities, and roles/responsibilities for implementation
- Deliver – Execute roadmap and associated activities according to the applicable framework and implementation plan. Perform coaching throughout preparation and launch activities.