Adam Boas

Head of Delivery – Platform Services, MYOB

People Over Process

As Agile has increased its dominance as a software delivery methodology it has grown tentacles into every part of software development companies, and many that have little or nothing to do with software. In some places it has morphed from a simple set of principles and practices to a full blown process methodology. But it could be that companies have totally missed the point, focussing on making Agile into something familiar – and in some cases, completely at odds to what historically made it successful in the first place.

Perhaps process improvement and development methodologies are not what has made Agile such a success in improving outcomes for delivery teams and companies. Software, and ultimately business value for software company customers, is delivered by people. Those people are the most important factor in success for a product or a project. Not ideas, not tools, and certainly not processes. If this is true, perhaps we have been focusing on the wrong things – and changing the things we value and promote will deliver that increase in productivity that Agile promised – but for many companies, has failed to deliver.

Adam Boas has a long history in software delivery as a developer, technical leader, architect and manager. His career in application, web and mobile development has taken him from coding and design to architecture and team building as well as coaching and management. He has worked in consultancies and product companies in various industries.Over the past 15 years, Adam has developed a keen interest in both distributed systems and distributed teams. His work with distributed teams has involved both working with remote individuals and teams in product companies as well as building offshore delivery centres and teams to provide elastic capacity to other product companies. He is currently the head of Technology for MYOB’s platform services.