The biggest obstacle to scaling agile is the lack of business buy-in, according to Mark Crowe, director of product management at VersionOne, which is why the company wanted to focus on aligning enterprise delivery with business strategy in its latest release.
“If the commitment to adopt and scale agile is not driven from the leadership to the execution teams, then the agile initiatives will stall,” he said.
VersionOne recently announced its 2015 Winter Release with new capabilities designed to make scaling agile easier.
“The latest release of VersionOne deepens the alignment between the business objectives and software delivery teams by enabling project and portfolio managers to view, prioritize, forecast and align projects from the highest business initiatives to execution in a single platform,” said Crowe.
New capabilities include:
- Strategic themes—helps prioritize and drive work by providing the ability to group and view all items under its particular strategic theme
- Epic timeline drilldown—allows teams to drill into details, priorities and progress in order to ensure alignment of projects and commitments
- Forecasting with the Monte Carlo Simulation—a predictive model solution that gives project managers the ability to predict project and epic completion dates
- CommitStream—provides a cohesive view of code changes on work items such as stories and defects
“Successful enterprise agile transformation requires strategic focus on aligning all projects within the larger context of the business strategy,” said Robert Holler, CEO of VersionOne. “The Winter Release makes this easier by keeping the highest-priority initiatives front and center for project teams at every level, and at every point in the delivery process.”
In addition, the company said it has added new enhancements that improve visual work management and overall user experience. Streamlined API security was also improved to simplify the authentication process for external apps that connect to VersionOne.
More information is available here.
