Over the years our staff have been helping organizations adopt an agile approach to project

delivery, we have found that there are several stages to truly becoming agile, and that the

journey is different for most organizations.

Recently, Diana Larsen and James Shore wrote about this in an article they called “Your Path

through Agile Fluency”, which is tightly aligned with our experiences and approach.

Tortillis Group offers a number of workshops to help you advance from one stage of agile

fluency to the next, with each workshop based on actionable, focused, project or team

instruction and practice. Our objective in each workshop is for the participants to leave with

someone they can use immediately, tools that will help them improve the development

process as soon as they are back at their computer or talking with their constituents. We

firmly believe that the “learn it – use it – teach it” model has the greatest impact on

individuals and organizations, and we follow this principle in all our workshops.

When you first decide to adopt agile, it is important to know what to do, and what to expect.

Our Agile Adoption for Executives workshop sets expectations at the leadership level,

providing the basic terminology, metrics, and approaches to be used by these leaders. Our

Agile Training workshop gives the new agile team everything they need to know to start

practicing agile, from developing user stories to executing an iteration.

After a while, the culture of the organization starts to shift, and different groups in the

organization realize that they mus adapt to a new paradigm. Our workshops for Business

Analysis and Project Management give these teams the skills they need to operate most

effectively in an agile workplace. The Project Inception workshop helps the agile team –

from business through to technology – how best to define, plan, and start-up a new project in

a fast, effective way using agile and lean principles.

Now the agile team is ready to learn and adopt new technical skills, to increase development

speed, while increasing the quality of the solution they deliver. This is where our Developer

Practices and QA Practices workshop add the most value, allowing the entire team to

understand how to get to the right level of quality, while practicing highly-effective agile

development.

At this point, the organization is seeing results they probably did not even imagine when they

started their agile journey, and many organizations stop adopting new approaches. This is

fine – after all, success looks different to every organization, and we must respect this.

However, for those organizations that want to keep delivering value, but at a much higher

pace, Continuous Delivery is the direction to go. Introduction to Continuous Delivery is

aimed at the extended agile team (including release management, operations, and other folks

involved in the entire release-to-production process), while our CD for Executives workshop

sets the organizational expectations for this new direction. These workshops set the

organization on the path to delivering software to production on a frequent – think daily,

hourly, or multiple times and hour – basis.

After practicing CD for a while, you may want some additional help specifically for your

delivery method, and the organization that orchestrates this delivery. Our CD in Practice

offering is part workshop, part discovery, part industry proven-practices. We help you

understand the bottlenecks in your delivery pathway, and help with improving these

constraints, while introducing you to new, effective methods of delivery.