Agile+ is a pragmatic method for getting your business where it wants to be in the shortest possible time. It allows you to fully exploit the business knowledge and skills of your own people, using tried and tested methods and tools, to deliver practical and robust solutions to efficiency, productivity and service problems.

It is different because operational business people retain control and maintain a stake in the process, and very small teams of people can effect significant positive change.

If your business needs to do more with less, look no further than Appligenics Agile+.

When faced with precisely defining just what Appligenics does, we argued long and hard. Methodology is a rather grand word, conjuring up images of swathes of documentation better suited to technical research laboratories than the real world, but unlike others, Appligenics' methodology is:

• Results-oriented
• Pragmatic, and
• Business-focused

These qualities give organizations that use our methodology unusual flexibility and speed. Therefore, we decided to call it Agile+ ("agile plus").

We train people to use Agile+ and the accompanying tools in just one week, and then help them along the way in their first few projects as they develop their skills. The Agile+ practitioners have at their disposal powerful skill and tool sets that:

• Provide a structured method for analyzing and devising answers to efficiency, productivity, and service issues
• Allow you to develop business ideas quickly and deliver tangible results much faster than you can today
• Provide early and accurate visibility of time and cost for any given project, typically in the first 48 hours
• Give business people involvement and control in the development of the systems they will ultimately use

The Origins of Agile+

The origins of Agile+ stem from the World Class Manufacturing movement of the 1980s when western businesses finally reacted to the new techniques developed by the Japanese in manufacturing. Faced with lower cost and better quality competition, Europe and the United States had to reform or die. The present trend towards outsourcing our service industries has many similarities to those times, as we see lower-cost economies winning business at the expense of the higher cost base in Europe and the United States.

The initial reaction of many manufacturers in the 1980s was to attack the symptom rather than seek a radical solution. They had programs for cost cutting through layoffs, sending production to other countries, ramping up throughput even though it was a case of making worse product. Most of those companies are no longer with us and their international competitors to this day still dominate, only now they are global corporations.

One of the most enduring legacies of that time has become the culture of constant change in order to evolve and improve the organization, known as "kaizen" (literally "good change"). Quality was of huge importance, as was involving business stakeholders in the design and development process, but it is the constant mindset of evolution that still lives with us.

Much has been written about change, and businesses have become better at it, but there are still fundamental obstacles that delay progress, and in a survey by Forbes magazine and the Gartner Group in 2004, the top three barriers were identified as:

• Culture
• IT
• Process

Appligenics Agile+ is aimed at overcoming these barriers to change, and using it will release your people to transform the way they do business.