Is Agility Even Possible in Implementing Commercial, Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Systems?
Many individuals who have worked as part of an initiative to implement off-the-shelf systems have heard that agile approaches can’t work - that agile only works when building solutions from scratch or adding functionality to these systems. We believe and have seen, that agile approaches are actually preferable to a traditional waterfall in these instances, and the differences between proprietary and customization of commercially available system development have more in common than not.
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.