Several tools and resources are available today to help businesses maximize the value of the output produced. Most of the products and software we use daily are due to the Agile methodology. Yet, embracing the Agile operating model can be frustrating and tough, especially for businesses that are reluctant to embrace change.

Before we delve into the Agile methodology and how it’s needed to scale your business, let’s look at what Agile is.

What is Agile?

Agile is the potential to generate and respond to change. It’s a way of adapting and thriving in an unstable and uncertain environment. Organizations are further adopting digital transformation approaches when faced with disruption threats to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. Once they do, agile software development often sets in.

Agile Methodologies

The Agile Manifesto is a crucial document with so much impact that it serves as a manual for Agile development, laying out good practices and principles. 

Since its inception in 2001, Agile has flourished in project management and the software industry. The Agile Manifesto creators prefer “Agile” as the tag for the entire idea since the word defined the flexibility and responsiveness to change which was imperative to their methods.

Agile is a software development approach that seeks the frequent delivery of working software built-in quick iterations. But the term “agile methodology” is deceiving since it means that agile is a singular approach to software development. Agile isn’t a set of prescriptions on what actions to take in software development. It’s a way of thinking about workflows, collaborations, and values guiding our decisions on what we create and how we create it.

In reality, Agile software development methodologies entail quick delivery of small bits of working software to improve customer experience. It uses teamwork and adaptive approaches to focus on continuous improvement. This software development approach often comprises small and self-organizing teams of software developers and business reps. These groups attend in-person meetings together regularly throughout the software development life cycle.

Through Agile methodologies, businesses can deliver value to customers more quickly and with fewer issues. They can achieve this by managing projects and iteratively developing software. An agile team approach delivers tasks in little but consumable additions instead of pledging everything on a big-bang launch. 

Teams can rapidly respond to change by continuously evaluating plans, requirements, and results.

The Agile Manifesto and most of its 12 principles state that:

• Agile processes encourage sustainable development since their technical excellence and constant rhythm improve productivity.
• Customer satisfaction is a top priority, shown through timely delivery and added value.
• The development team should work with the customer daily to facilitate the team and synchronize the product.
• Reflective moments within a team are vital, enabling them to make the necessary adjustments and promote efficiency.
• Development teams need good support and a pleasant environment to keep them motivated.

Besides the quick delivery of software, the primary benefit of using Agile methodologies is the continuous delivery of value to the customer because deliveries are progressive.

Once considered just a trend, Agile has matured into a famous and valued framework. It has expanded outside of the IT and software development industry into the automotive manufacturing, management consulting, banking, and healthcare sectors.

There are several benefits of adopting agile approaches. Agile methods can help:

• Reduce risk and eliminate waste
• Reach markets faster
• Promote better collaboration
• Help you gain an edge in the future
• Create high-quality products that customers value

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development describes four top traits that should be valued over other concerns. These are:

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Software in operation over comprehensive records
• Interaction and individuals over tools and processes
• Response to change over following a scheme of arrangement

Scrum

Several different Agile methodologies exist today, including Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming (XP). While all of these methods have gained traction among various businesses and industries, Scrum remains the most used Agile framework for software development. What is Scrum? It is characterized by stages or cycles of development called sprints. Teams use scrum to establish a hypothesis, test, and reflect on the experience and adjust. With scrum, teams can incorporate practices from other frameworks based on the conditions.

How to Scale Your Business with Agile

If you discover that there’s more demand than you can deliver constantly, then it means that you need to scale your Agile teams. Switching to an Agile culture takes work. It takes a radical mindset of how you do business. 

Scaling agile across your company yields flexibility, agility, and organizational health. Here are some tips to follow to make your business more agile.

1. Focus on the questions: The questions you want to address must be your sense of direction. Ensure that the solution you seek drives meaningful and specific action.
2. Measure for insights: It could be enticing to gather huge amounts of data over instrument infrastructure and code, which becomes another management migraine. Stand firm and focus on a specific area to show value.
3. Run experiments: Guide ongoing trials with analytics and predict changes that will enhance the customer experience. Through analytics, you can validate the outcome of proposed optimizations before adopting them at scale.
4. Optimize for the organization: Ensure your efforts are deeply rooted in the organization. Don’t allow data to distract you. Data collection and instrumentation are crucial. But they must focus on answering questions that matter to the organization and customer in a continuous feedback curve.

Wrapping Up

The agile software development method and general framework are your tickets to success in the application economy. Companies that survive and thrive in this global landscape are the ones that quickly and confidently deliver fast value, respond to change, and build high-quality and valuable products.

Rally by Broadcom Software is the foundation of enterprise agility. With it, your organization will have improved clarity, speed, stability, innovation, and operational discipline.  

Plan, focus, manage, monitor, and always improve your work with Rally by Broadcom today. To learn more about this leading enterprise agility platform, contact A&I Solutions.

The post What is Agile and Why Does Your Organization Need It? appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Rally and Clarity by Broadcom Software are examples of two solutions that can be used together to improve outcomes and produce positive company-wide results. Read on to learn the benefits of using Rally and Clarity together.

Rally Software Overview 

Rally is an enterprise agile planning and management platform that helps teams track progress and manage workflows to align with business objectives. It can create and track user stories, enable collaboration across multiple teams, identify bottlenecks and monitor progress.

By implementing agile processes and systems, companies can act proactively to create value for their customers and ensure business goals are being met. When you have business agility, you improve stability and speed, enhance clarity, and increase operational discipline and innovation.

Rally helps organizations achieve agility by providing visibility in planning, progress, tracking, bottlenecks, and dependencies. Rally’s robust and scalable platform enables real-time tracking, risk management, and iterations. This means you can manage your project cycles without hassle. 

Features of Rally Software

Prioritizing certain essential activities in a project is key to completing a project efficiently. Rally can help you prioritize and fine-tune your backlogs while assessing risks at every stage. In addition, you can use Rally’s powerful analytics dashboard to help you understand and improve your team’s performance.

Key features include:

• Customizable Dashboard: Create personalized dashboards to easily view important data, metrics, and milestones.
• Real-time visibility: Rally’s flow diagrams show progress, calling you to identify and resolve bottlenecks before they escalate to problems.
• Plan work and measure results: Rally offers a comprehensive view of current progress to facilitate proactive and intentional decision-making. It also enables you to measure results against critical delivery dates and milestones. 
• Align teams and fine-tune execution: With its team board feature, Rally allows teams to easily view all components of an iteration from ideation to completion to gain insight into the velocity of work and verify critical elements of a user story or defect.

Benefits of Rally Software 

To reduce business waste, align business objectives, and maximize ROI, you need to create agility with Rally Software. Rally can help you realize the following benefits: 

• Accelerate time to market. With Rally Software, you can eliminate bottlenecks in production. As a result, you can plan and release your services and products to the market without delay.
• Facilitate collaboration across teams and tools. The software can streamline collaboration and minimize communication breakdown. 
• Empower your teams. Rally software allows your teams to access real-time progress and performance visibility for continuous improvement.

Clarity Overview

Clarity, on the other hand, is a strategic portfolio project management solution designed to maximize business value.

Clarity transforms traditional project management into a comprehensive, multi-dimensional digital project management solution with a singular platform for managing it all. If you’re struggling with project management, harnessing Clarity can help you manage value streams and counter possible disruptions. Some of the key features of Clarity include:

• Idea management. Clarity ensures you focus on the best value streams, allowing you to map ideas to business strategies.
• Collaborative work. With Clarity, you can not only create a to-do list, you can automate your to-do lists and share your list with others.
• Powerful financials. Clarity can help ensure your business investments bring optimum value by allowing you to create smart financial plans with the ability to view plans by cost and transaction type and track planned costs to actuals, plus so much more.

Key Benefits of Clarity

With Clarity, you can meet your customers’ ever-changing demands for goods and services. Clarity gives you a competitive advantage by focusing on top-level planning and makes it easy to connect various work streams to specific initiatives. This tool allows you to have a 360-degree view of your business operations, which allows for strategic, long and short-term planning and optimal outcomes. 

Rally Software and Clarity Integration Overview

With integrated Rally and Clarity features, you can increase transparency among the organization’s development groups, financial teams, and business leaders. Rally enables teams to manage their daily tasks and delivers essential data to Clarity to provide valuable insight into financials to help teams make informed decisions about investments that will serve the best interest of the business. Together Rally and Clarity provide enhanced visibility into your projects, fostering collaboration between teams and minimizing obstacles.

Advantages of Using Rally and Clarity Together

1. Integration creates time efficiency. When you integrate the two, Rally automatically sends information to Clarity to update roadmaps, reports, and hierarchies. This data transfer increases time efficiency and reduces obstacles associated with human-to-human communication.
2. Enhance real-time data transfer. Rally can feed Clarity with real-time data instead of estimated hours.
3. Integration improves scope management. With increased visibility into the details and management of a project, you can manage the scope of your project more efficiently. The data provided can help you decide whether to make changes to the timeline or keep things as is.
4. Clarity and Rally enhance delivery tracking. Determining whether your project will be completed as planned is an essential factor. It allows you to evaluate finances, time, and the workforce needed.

Integrate Rally Software With Clarity With the Help of A&I Solutions

The easiest way to reap the benefits of Rally and Clarity is to discuss your needs with a trusted and experienced IT expert like A&I Solutions. Our technical consultants will walk you through the various options of integrating the two solutions to find the best method to fit your company’s unique needs.

Contact A&I Solutions to learn more about our integrated technology solutions and how we can help you achieve more.

The post Rally and Clarity: Better Together appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Even project-driven companies often struggle to align projects with their overarching business goals. Although executive leaders and business managers often strive to implement projects that maximize capital and enhance ROI, evaluating and prioritizing these projects can be difficult if you don’t have the right Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software or tools.

Having the right PPM tools can be a step ahead towards organizing your company processes and strategies, and most importantly, help your company efficiently manage their entire value stream. So, how exactly can a PPM be of benefit to your business? Read on to learn how a PPM software solution, like Clarity by Broadcom Software, can help accelerate your business success.

What is a Project Portfolio Management Tool?

To start with, let’s first discuss what a project portfolio management (PPM) tool actually is. Simply put, a PPM software solution or tool helps companies of all shapes and sizes realize which projects are most critical, attainable, and beneficial. Selecting, executing, and implementing projects that are most in line with a company’s workforce capacity and financial resources will ultimately help companies execute and reach their goals faster.  Essentially, a project portfolio management software solution can provide your organization with the necessary data to put all the pieces of multiple projects together as well as provide insight and clarity to assess how certain projects will impact the business and evaluate their long-term benefits.

PPM tools are not only essential in strengthening overall project management and company processes, they are also vital for a company’s strategic planning and decision-making process, helping companies to determine which portfolio of investments are worth undertaking and which are not driving a company’s objectives as intended.  

Why is a PPM Tool Important?

Reduces Overspending

Overspending on projects can be a key hindrance to project success. Many organizations are unable to have effective budgeting for projects. Different factors contributing to overspending on projects include faulty resource allocation, zero visibility into project data, poor project estimates, and improper scheduling. Leveraging a PPM software solution, such as Clarity by Broadcom, is key to cutting down such mistakes. With Clarity, you can create financial plans, view plans by cost type,  sort plans by roles, compare cost plans to actuals,  and more to ensure your investments stay on track.

Better Decision Making

A key element of using technology in business is the ability to use solid data in decision making. PPM tools facilitate smart business decisions through accurate data and visibility, which provides a strong foundation for strategic and tactical planning.

A PPM tool gives project management visibility ahead of the project, making it easier to anticipate outcomes and make appropriate decisions for each step forward. 

Boosts Collaboration

Many organizations still can not execute multiple projects simultaneously due to their continued use of traditional methods (i.e. excel sheets) and manual approaches to project planning and reporting. In such cases, such organizations use emails and other data transfer modes that cannot facilitate timely information sharing, time tracking, or the ability to view investments across a portfolio of initiatives from one single point.

On the contrary, software such as Clarity by Broadcom, increases a team’s collaboration and effeciency by facilitating real-time data transfer and reporting, enabling complete project visibility from a centralized dashboard as well as giving teams the ability to assign tasks with just one click and automate simple tasks when needed.

By leveraging this tool, many members of your project team can access and work on multiple projects, each with its individual pieces, and still coordinate all projects within a single interface. This not only enhances teamwork but also helps the team to hit the ground running and ensure projects stay on target.

Facilitate Successful Project Delivery

Most organizational project failure results from ineffective delivery. Ineffective delivery may involve unresolved project issues and costs running over budget. Project portfolio management software help companies reduce such problems. They allow you to plan projects based on available resources, objectives, workforce, and timeline as well as anticipate future needs.

Enhance Efficient Resource Allocation

Resource allocation is a key factor in managing a complex portfolio of initiatives. Unfortunately, traditional planning and resource allocation methods can cause the misutilization of essential resources due to limited portfolio visibility and not factoring in key elements, such as ROI. Such errors delay the achievement of an organization’s key objectives. 

However, PPM tools give you visibility into a project’s entire resource requirements, available resources, and the time needed to complete each project. This allows project managers to allocate more resources to projects of high value to the organization. 

Faster Project Turnaround

PPM tools streamline workflow in a project portfolio. The ability to automate repeatable processes allows teams to focus on other, more time-consuming and complex tasks. Automating these processes keeps the project running on track with minimal monitoring while increasing productivity. Shorter turnarounds are also key competitive advantages over your competitors. 

How Do I Choose a PPM Tool?

Selecting the best PPM tool for your organization can be tricky, but aligning your project to overall business goals is essential. Therefore, choosing a PPM tool aligned with the general functionality you need for your business is vital. Consider the following features when selecting an effective PPM tool.

Scalability

It’s obvious that you may not require every feature each software can offer — you only utilize the features which align with your business objectives. However, you can’t limit yourself from foreseeable future opportunities. So, you need to select a tool to facilitate organizational growth without causing maintenance overhead.

But, creating a balance between scalability and simplicity can be daunting. On the one hand, you don’t need an oversized tool that may be difficult to integrate into your project portfolio. On the other hand, you want to have your future business needs covered. To balance these elements, you will need to plan for the foreseeable future for your company. Planning for features that you foresee your organization will need in the next three years can help you select a PPM tool with the necessary features to meets the demands on your expanding company.

Multiple Deployment Options

An essential factor to the success of your project portfolio is integrating the selected project portfolio management tool into your existing technology stack. A PPM tool needs to seamlessly integrate with your organization’s applications and architecture and be easy to implement and deploy. Clarity, for instance, is available on-prem or in the cloud and can connect to a variety of BI software.

Project Blueprint

An effective PPM tool act as a blueprint for the project portfolio. Why overwhelm project teams with irrelevant information about the tasks they are working on? Too much unessential data can cloud visibility and inhibit efficient problem-solving. In addition, some tools may contain too many features that may not be necessary to your current projects. While such features can be used in future projects, it’s important to prioritize a tool that maximizes the execution and implementation of the current projects.  

The clarity PPM blueprinting feature provides project teams with specific information arranged in fields that each user needs to use. Here, members can easily drag and drop their documents and make changes to the data, which are automatically reflected on other members’ screens. 

User-Friendliness

The last thing you want for your company is a technology tool that can bring added complexities to users. Most PPM tools can meet many topics mentioned above, but when it comes to usability, not all tools have the ease of use many users can handle. As a project leader, you want to ensure your business objectives are attained and minimize the complexities a PPM tool can add to users’ efficiency. 

If the proposed project focuses on replacing the existing PPM tools, added complexities to the new tools may face resistance from project managers and team members. People like a tool they can work with better than the current one. However, if the proposed project involves replacing existing tools with others that enhance users’ efficiency, it can have a positive response, hence increased productivity. 

Choosing the Best PPM Tool to Accelerate Your Business Success

A&I Solutions can help you realize the maximum benefits of your project portfolio through the use of Clarity.  As a leading information technology, software, and IT service provider focused on the Broadcom portfolio of products, our goal is to enable our customers to leverage the benefits of technology to simplify their IT processes and enhance their success.

Contact A&I Solutions for all of your project portfolio management software needs and more!

The post Accelerating Your Business Success Using a PPM Tool appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Highlights of Clarity 16.0.2 include:

• new collaborative work management features

• new Canvas action item widget

• ability to sync multi-valued lookups

• …and more!

Check out the roadmap session below for a complete list of updates and enhancements to Clarity.

Why Clarity?

• Powerful financials
• Ability to create, share and automate work
• Project, idea, and resource management
• Plus so much more!

Interested in learning more? Contact us with questions or to schedule a demo of Clarity.

The post Clarity Roadmap: What’s New and Next appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Effective monitoring of advanced IT systems and infrastructure requires you to apply an integrated approach. This will help you attain visibility into all your business services and applications. An integrated enterprise IT monitoring software enables you to collect data and relate incidents.

Additionally, you can make fresh discoveries from new and current enterprise monitoring tools both in the cloud or on-premise.

What Are the Short-Comings of Silo-Monitoring?

Silo-monitoring refers to where every team monitors their system without bringing other teams on board.

Essentially, without the advanced enterprise monitoring tools, your security applications will be exposed to threats. So, you’ll spend hours fixing threats. Also, your staff will have recurring problems with several applications and will constantly get error messages.

That’s a monitoring failure that cannot be fixed by merely switching your phone number. Traditional monitoring is siloed. It involves having several teams using different tools to control your servers. With this approach, your team will spend a lot of time responding to application failure alerts bringing a halt to essential business operations. Besides, identifying and addressing the underlying problem will be an uphill task and will even increase downtime. That will hurt your business.

With siloed monitoring, you’ll have several tools to maintain and manage, countless system upgrades, and your team will need regular training. This approach will increase your expenses and reduce your income. The aftermath is fewer resources, poor customer experience, and probably business stagnation.

In Siloed monitoring, most applications in multiple systems rely on each other to enhance business functions. Nevertheless, it’s hard to diagnose problems that affect all systems since each team focuses on issues occurring in their systems.

In such a case, the teams may seek expert assistance, which is not a guarantee the cause of the problem will be established. And even if it does, the situation may have escalated, taking its toll on your business operations.

Do I Need IT Monitoring Software?

You need IT monitoring software now more than ever to cope with the distributed system, edge computing, and the cloud. Of course, you don’t want your business to be a reflection of immature monitoring.

That refers to a case where you have multiple monitoring tools and numerous processes. If that happens, your business curve will assume a downward trend. Also, that will result in a negative user experience and confusion in all your IT and business systems.

Why Are Enterprise Monitoring Tools a Good Substitute to Silo-Monitoring?

Integrated enterprise software is more effective since it uses a centralized system and a unique approach to collect, evaluate, forecast, and reveal overall system performance.

The primary goal of enterprise monitoring is to boost the availability of system applications. It also reduces time spent responding to enterprise system hitches. That increases productivity and the profit margin.

Enterprise application monitoring focuses on the infrastructure and uses information collected from the infrastructure to give insight to the IT team on how the underlying problem in all the systems affects the availability of the applications.

That makes it easy to fix the problem, and the entire team works as a single entity because they’ll be using the same monitoring tool. This approach reduces costly downtime and saves time and cost.

The following are benefits of integrated enterprise monitoring:

Boost Customer Experience

Your business’s success depends on its ability to appeal to new and existing customers. Most customers will stick to businesses that feature the current trends. Integrated enterprise monitoring ensures that applications are readily available and that they are operating at high speed.

Attain Visibility and Coverage across Multiple Microservices

Traditional monitoring is ineffective because it may not cover all microservices within a system. But centralized monitoring encompasses all elements, thereby boosting coverage and visibility for all microservices.

Improve Proactive Monitoring

Silo-monitoring is reactive. It alerts the team of an existing problem, and they are expected to fix it. If the problem only affects their system, that strategy works, although it leads to increased downtime.

However, a centralized monitoring strategy enables stakeholders to monitor all applications and services. That way, you’ll spot problems before they happen and interrupt operations.

Save Time and Money by Reducing Downtime Occurrences

An integrated monitoring tool forecasts problems in your IT system or infrastructure. Therefore, teams can address the issue before they cause downtime. That also reduces time spent fixing problems. This saves time and money and helps to improve your customer base.

Increases Return on Investment (ROI)

Every business person starts a business in the hope that it will have a higher Return on Investment. But this is not always the case, especially if the company has not embraced the current technology. Regular repairs, increased downtime, and rampant operation interruptions reduce ROI. You can increase ROI by ensuring that applications are always available. That’s the goal of integrated monitoring.

Forecasts the Future

The IT and infrastructure market is constantly advancing. Being able to predict the future helps you to get prepared in advance. That will give your business a competitive edge. An integrated enterprise monitoring strategy uses the data you provide to predict future trends. Moreover, it alerts you when to add extra resources to your server, preventing your applications from slowing down.

Speed-Up Innovation

Integrated enterprise IT monitoring software reduces the time spent fixing system hitches. That frees more time enabling your team to concentrate on other productive business activities.

Where to Find Top-Notch Enterprise Software Products?

A&I Solutions offers top-of-the-line enterprise software solutions by Broadcom. Broadcom’s enterprise software solutions help leading businesses transform their operations with intelligent, integrated software that enables collaboration and alignment across business operations and IT. From enterprise monitoring to continuous testing, business management, security and more, Broadcom has intelligent software solutions to meet any and all of your tech needs.

Contact A&I Solutions now to find out what world-class enterprise software solutions can do for you

The post Why Should You Prioritize Integrated Enterprise Software? appeared first on A&I Solutions.