Highly Regulated Industries - Are Agile Approaches Even Possible?
Agile approaches have become mainstream in the 20ish years since the manifesto, but many transformation efforts fail or aren't even considered possible, in highly regulated environments. Financial services, insurance, healthcare, and others have necessary constraints in the development and delivery of products and services. These constraints are often considered insurmountable in the context of agile development and delivery, and traditional, legacy waterfall methods are chosen. Other pseudo-agile approaches are also used, often using the language of agile but violating its core principles, for example, having three month-long sprints, and a big bang delivery at the end, effectively still perpetuating waterfall and its inherent challenges.
For those who are in highly regulated environments and believe, or have been told, that agile approaches are inherently incompatible, this discussion will outline some approaches to include or increase agility in those environments. It also will outline what actions or efforts should be approached differently than traditional agile standards, or at least with a different level of emphasis, focus, or preparation.
Attendees who work within highly regulated industries should leave the session better prepared to thoughtfully approach how to introduce or increase agile approaches in their environments, with practical tips and techniques.
Interests
John Halberstadt is LitheSpeed’s Director of Agile Consulting, as well as an Enterprise Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer, leveraging more than two decades of executive leadership experience as a CIO, CTO, and Vice President of Technology, transforming enterprises’ ability to deliver value through agile and lean approaches. John has led successful agile transformation efforts extensively in the Finance and Insurance domains since the mid-2000s. He additionally has helped guide organizations in additional industries as diverse as Healthcare, Retail, Utilities, and Artificial Intelligence on their path to greater agility and value realization from their technology investments. John’s most recent focus has been assisting organizations to define and implement strategies for ongoing product development and delivery at the portfolio, program, and team levels. He has also built and led product management, software development, user experience, technical support, and data center operations teams during the last two decades. John has been a leader of Agile development teams since 2006 and has led software development program teams since 1997. He holds multiple Agile certifications and is the founder/co-founder and leader of multiple Agile and Lean practitioners groups throughout the West Coast.