Agile Software Delivery is of major importance to reduce cost, mitigate risk and improve quality. IBM Rational provides a lightweight agile development management environment empowering teams to collaboratively plan, execute, and deliver working applications. But when running an agile software delivery practice it's still of major importance to secure that there is value driven process and that the agile software delivery activities is connected to strategy and business value. Even in an agile world the business climate change, customers do get new wants and needs - this has to be managed, communicated and collaborated with the agile software delivery teams to secure that the focus lies on what will generate most value for the organization.

Application Portfolio Management handled the correct way can generate business agility. Today organizations face brittle and tightly coupled architectures, unwarranted complexity, and technology proliferation. This creates barriers in order to respond to market changes, market requests, stakeholder requirements etc in a timely and effective manner. The application portfolio hinders organizations to be as agile as they want and need to be in order to stay effective and competitive.

The IBM Rational® integrated solution for application portfolio management provides insight into the key business functions an application supports and the health and viability of the application.

IT faces considerable pressure to support new business initiatives while cutting costs. In order to be able to make this, organizations need to be agile. Looking at this from an application landscape perspective, the growing and aging application portfolio leads to reduced business agility, since it takes too long for updates to these systems to yield any effective response to an emerging business or marketplace need. And in today's business climate, quick results are of the essence, and deploying a simple but robust solution APM information model can get you those quick results. At the same time, you need to make sure that the solution scales with increasing needs and a maturing APM process.

Effective governance for lean development isn't about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. Scott Ambler and Per Kroll write how it is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to force them to do so. Learn how to form a lightweight, collaboration-based framework that reflects the realities of modern IT organizations.

In the Five imperatives for effective Application Lifecycle Management, By Carolyn Pampino, Program Director for Strategic Offerings Focused on IT Software Delivery, IBM, learn how Rational's innovative and unique Jazz technology can help you gain an open, extensible, and integrated platform to unify and extend your infrastructure to include open source software, packaged and custom applications, and other commercial solutions of choice. Having an integrated but open platform across the software delivery lifecycle enables development teams to benefit from the five imperatives for effective ALM: real-time collaboration, project transparency, process automation, traceability and repeatable best practices from initial requirements definition to software change and release management and beyond.

Applications are evolving at an ever-faster pace. These applications are not discrete islands; they build on a complex, interconnected set of components that includes disparate technologies, developers, deployment topologies and organizations. Developers must deliver high-quality applications while limiting their testing expenses. In this challenging environment, a combination of automated integration testing and test virtualization can enable test teams to improve software quality and keep up with the rate of change. This whitepaper helps address these needs by describing the benefits that can be gained through a proactive and continuous approach to integration testing with IBM® Rational® test automation solutions.

IBM Rational Team Concert provides a lightweight agile development management environment empowering teams to collaboratively plan, execute, and deliver working applications. Coupled with IBM Rational Focal Point we add the front end to this securing that we plan, execute and deliver the right things. In addition we also create a vehicle to align business and delivery so value and change can be governed across the entire lifecycle. This way we can handle agile software delivery in IBM Rational Team Concert, but LOB and management can handle the business needs, business case, manage change and value with support in Rational Focal Point and transfer this data to the agile teams as needed.

Agile software development techniques have taken the industry by storm, with 76% of organizations reporting that they have one or more agile projects currently under way. Agile is becoming widespread because it works — organizations are finding that agile project teams, as compared to traditional project teams, enjoy higher success rates, deliver higher quality projects, have greater levels of stakeholder satisfaction, provide better return on investment (ROI) and deliver systems to market sooner. An Agile process works not just for co-located teams, but it can also be leveraged to effectively deliver working software in distributed environments, too.

What about the wall between business and IT/delivery? The one that in many organizations today creates an obstacle to align IT delivery with strategy and business objectives. The wall that makes it nearly impossible to effectively manage change. The wall that enables silos and creates a barrier for innovation and ideas to reach your customers. The wall that misguides focus on execution instead of value, the same wall that leads to miscommunicated and misaligned business priorities and lack of accountability. In an agile environment this wall is a huge obstacle for development and business agility, but broken down - the importance of agile development and delivery connected to portfolio management can not be underestimated. Listen to IDC and IBM as they discuss Delivery Management and how end to end lifecycle collaboration, communication, decision making is core for an agile practice to be truly successful.

Complexity is the biggest challenge faced by companies looking to deliver innovative applications, products and solutions while managing costs. An integrated approach to application lifecycle management (ALM) that includes design management can help! Join Don Yantzi, IBM Collaborative Design Management, and Cindy VanEpps, IBM Strategic Solutions, as they share how a focus on design and the adoption of five imperatives for effective ALM can help you manage complexity, improve quality, reduce costs and increase collaboration across the entire team. They will also demonstrate IBM tooling that supports a collaborative approach to design, development and lifecycle management and allows teams to now involve stakeholders from across the organization and beyond in the design process.

Many large organizations desire to adopt Agile development methodologies as a means of delivering software to customers and internal stakeholders more quickly and efficiently in "bite-sized" increments. However, large projects can pose significant challenges to agility. Extensive improvements in quality, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction show that the rewards of Agile adoption far outweigh the obstacles. This webcast discusses how IBM learned that a haphazard implementation of Agile may result in more frequent development "turns", but can also fail to deliver true business benefits. In effect, the wrong Agile implementation may just mean that bad code is being released to market faster than before. Learn more!