On the 5 October 2022, PHBS UK Campus held its first seminar of the new academic year 2022-3. We had the honour of having Mr Simon Robertson, an acclaimed Agile Coach and Trainer, to share with us about the idea of Agile Delivery and address the question of whether Agile Delivery can really benefit business development and operations. Mr Robertson is a graduate of the University of Witwatersrand Business School and a certified Project Manager. He has delivered both strategic and project management training to a wide variety of business and audiences. He also has extensive experience in delivering a wide range of IT infrastructure and software delivery projects as well as business transformation change programmes. It is indeed a great pleasure for us to have Mr Robertson with us and share with us his experiences and expertise.
In his seminar, Mr Robertson addressed the notion of what the definition of Agile Delivery is and what does it mean when it is used as a catchphrase. Indeed, while we define Agile Delivery by it being a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users, Mr Robertson cautioned that many businesses need to actively practice it rather than throw it around in meetings as an empty buzzword.
With that thought in mind, Mr Robertson took us into a deep dive into what does it mean to be Agile via the Agile Manifesto (2001). However, no theoretical explanation of what it is works better than a real-life example of what it is not; Mr Robertson illustrated with a company’s planning process as an example, on what the difference is between Predictive Delivery and Agile Delivery. It is clear from that example what many people in organisations feel about Gantt Charts.
Laughters aside, Mr Robertson’s illustration drove home the point about the massive difference between predictive process of defined plan and control versus the empirical process control that is promoted by the agile process. One is incremental and the other iterative. With that in mind, Mr Robertson further expanded his discussion into how the agile process benefits project management and how agile management allows for collaborative cross-functional teams which would enable the delivery of the various aspects of business value to the customer as quickly as possible.
To round off his presentation, Mr Robertson provided several useful suggestions on how management teams can start the journey to Agile Delivery. He gave valuable insights into how companies can start moving their project management into scaled agile and enterprise transformation.
It was certainly a very insightful and informative seminar. The staff and students at PHBS-UK thank Mr Robertson for sharing his experience and expertise with us. We certainly learned a lot and we hope that our students would be able to take the things that they have learned today about Agile Management into their future careers.
