AgilePoint Enhances Business Agility

Do you want to deliver value more quickly and reliably?  Do you want to increase the value that is created for each unit organizational effort?  These are common goals driving the Agile initiatives in many organizations.  AgilePoint is here to help.  We provide a platform for rapid process automation and iterative process improvement.  In addition, AgilePoint was created with your productivity and effectiveness in mind.  AgilePoint’s modeling tool, Envision, is built on top of Microsoft Visio, making it easy for all employees to be quickly productive.  We believe that supporting cross-functional and multi-disciplinary involvement in business process management is key to achieving true Business Agility because:

1. The easiest way to reduce miscommunication, is to reduce the number of things that need to be communicated.  AgilePoint empowers the people who have the knowledge to do the work themselves!
2. The best way to promote process collaboration, is to provide a central common platform for creation and refinement.  With AgilePoint, the model is in Visio.  Everybody understands it. Everybody can contribute.
3. The best way to avoid churn and keep from “stepping on each other’s toes” is to have clearly defined boundaries across which we have a customer-and-service-provider relationship.  AgilePoint allows one group to bundle up processes to be easily consumed by other groups.  We won’t call it “Process as a Service,” but that’s the general idea.

The value of these capabilities in apparent, but Business Agility goes beyond this.  AgilePoint truly has Agility at it’s core.  Let’s test AgilePoint against the four core tenets of the Agile Manifesto:

1. Value individuals and interactions more highly than processes and tools.
With AgilePoint the tools don't get in the way!

• Most users who doing modeling are familiar with Visio.
• Little or no training is required.
• The modeling interface is unintimidating and easy to use.
• There is a shorter time to productivity and a reduced time to value.
 

AgilePoint promotes collaborative, iterative creation and refinement of models.  Individual empowerment and high-value person-to-person interactions are central to AgilePoint.  In addition, AgilePoint allows value-detracting interactions and department-to-department handoffs to be minimized or eliminated.  It’s not just about interacting.  It’s about having the right interactions.

2. Value working software more highly than comprehensive documentation.
With AgilePoint you can create a working system with remarkable speed and ease. You can fluidly migrate a proof of concept into a production-ready application with no waste or “throw away” code.
Comprehensive documentation is not necessary as the AgilePoint process model becomes the central and most important piece of documentation.  Since AgilePoint Envision is built on top of Visio, you can use all of your favorite Visio diagram shapes and notation techniques on your process models, making sure that they capture all of the relevant details and that they adhere to your documentation standards.
3. Value customer collaboration more highly than contract negotiation.
AgilePoint supports collaboration inside and outside or your organization.  You can involve customers in your processes through ASP.NET forms, and still use other form technologies for internally-facing tasks in the same process.  You can have select customers or in-the-field customer representatives to use AgilePoint to interact with SharePoint documents, even if SharePoint is not exposed outside externally.
4. Value responding to change more highly than following a plan.
With AgilePoint you don't need to have a perfect plan before you start designing a solution. AgilePoint supports rapid iterative refinement of process models, even process models that are in production.  You can move in-progress work to new process models with amazing ease and with a high-level of control—doing a complete migration, or just updating a few select process instances.
With AgilePoint you’ll immediately see that “Agile” isn’t just a part of our name.  Delivering unparalleled levels of Business Agility is our passion.  We’re looking forward to our Agile journey together!