Agile For All: Helping Organizations Sharpen their Agility

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Agile For Al

Bob Hartman, Founder, Agile For AlBob Hartman, Founder
Bob Hartman, aka 'Agile Bob,'holds over 30 years of experience and broad industry knowledge cultivated by wearing almost everyhat in the software industry. Charting an upward career trajectory, Hartman has climbed the ladder of success, starting from the developer level and going all the way up to an executive post. Later in his career, Hartman’s inquisitive mind helped him grow from being an early adopter of Agile to becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Certified EnterpriseCoach (CEC). Since then, he has done significant training, coaching, and mentoring, using Agile in all areas of business.

In April 2008, he founded Agile For All, an Agile and Scrum consulting firm to promote Agile methods. To democratize Agile, this consulting firm provides clients with a seamless, integrated experience across Agile techniques, principles, and values. "We help clients develop high-quality products, fast time to market, happy employees and customers, and solid ROI through the adoption of continuous improvement practices," mentions Hartman.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Hartman talks about the typical challenges that clients face while adopting Agile and how the company guides organizations through the nuances of adopting Agile successfully.

Can you talk about thechallenges that companies face when it comes to software development and Agile? How is Agile For All addressing the same?

Two of the biggest problems that I have observed in the Agile landscape relate to how companies can achieve business agility and measure success while leveraging Agile. We created Responsible Agilityas a decision-making framework that helps companies see the principles involved in each decision. Aligning to the specific context, we help our clients see the trade-offs that their decisions are making and enable them to mix and match various pieces with our framework to achieve better business agility.

While some of the named frameworks provide many advantages, they are not flexible with all environments. That is where our Responsible Agility framework comes into play as it is based on principles rather than specific techniques. By using the framework, people get to make those trade-offs rather than having the trade-offs made for them.

We help clients develop high-quality products, fast time to market, happy employees and customers, and solid ROI through the adoption of continuous improvement practices

Over the last 13 years, we have been successful at Making Agile a Reality®. So far, we have helped hundreds of companies and about 75,000 individuals in their Agile and Scrum training/coaching.

Please tell us about your client onboarding process.

Generally, when a client approaches us, we follow a step-by-step process that begins with giving them a brief overview of our approach. We want to ensure that the client's organization is compatible with our approach, principles, and methodology. After narrowing the client funnel, we comprehensively understand their requirements/context and suggest specific solutions for them. For better decision-making, we outline various advantages that they will have by availing a specific type of service from us.

Once the initial phase ends, we then design a flexible pricing model for our clients. As an agile and nimble firm that strongly believes in customer collaboration overcontract negotiation, we work in specific ways with our clients and design a solution that fits their requirements. From serving a small company to Fortune 50 organizations, we collaborate with our clients to deduce the best pricing model for them. We never want to be known as a company that overcharges its customers because, for us, creating a value proposition matters the most.

What are some of the differentiating factors that steer Agile For All ahead of the curve?

One of our biggest differentiating factors is that we are not tied to any specific names or solutions. We are agnostic. We are more about building exploratory partnerships with our clients where we are helping each other in understanding the context and coming up with good solutions. I think you would find all of our clients say that they worked with us rather than we worked for them. And to me, that is an important distinction because we want to be their trusted partner.

As the Founder of the company, I have always envisioned a world where people enjoy working—a world where they are properly valued, compensated, intrigued, and engaged. In my interactions with clients, I believe we are closer to creating that world through Agile For All.

What have you envisioned for the future of Agile For All?

The pandemic changed the world overnight, making work from home a permanent solution for many organizations. Our expansion will be primarily online in adherence to today’s needs.For example, we recently created a prototype Agile community off of our website. Since the COVID-19 onset, our online Agile community has already gainedthousands of members. This vibrant, Agile community helps people engage and get answers from us and each other in real-time.

In conjunction with this, we also want to have more online learning courses and on-demand courses for our clients. We are coming up with video and quiz content to help people increase their skillset over time. We also want to introduce a subscription model for people who want to enhance their skills by having access to everything we have online. By paying a minimal subscription fee, thousands of people will get access to our rich quality content. This is what we are currently focused on in terms of expanding online.

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