Quotes

Scott Ambler, Scott Ambler + Associates

 "I am excited about working with industry partners at SEMAT and leveraging the ESSENCE standard in order to not just have different types of re-usable domain content built up for use as accelerators in Disciplined Agile Delivery projects, but also to clearly guide the industry on the benefits of specific granular practices that are currently uniquely only present within the Disciplined Agile Delivery method.”

Burkhard Golomb-Perkens, MunichRe

"At Munich Re, one of the world¹s leading reinsurers, I¹m the owner of the way of working in application development. The application development of Munich Re is globally distributed, and its line organization is divided up along the development disciplines (aka ³stove pipe organization²: different departments for project management, requirements engineering, testing, development, technical architecture and so forth). Additionally we work heavily with different outsourcing partners for the disciplines. Hence, in almost every project Munich Re has many participants from different sources who have to agree on a common way of working. In the past we tried different approaches to establish a common view on our application development process. 

When ESSENCE was brought into the discussion, it was a marvelous step forward. By using ESSENCE the discussion was focused on the most important things first, we could agree on our common view of Munich Re¹s application development process, we could agree on process variants for different circumstances, we could define different practices with different levels of detail and different levels of bindingness, and many things more. In our experience, ESSENCE is a very helpful tool to provide guidance to the projects. The reason is, for defining a way of working, this standard has the right balance between setting an authoritative and guiding common ground, and at the same time allowing a required flexibility to cope with the wide variety of situations in application development. And ESSENCE is very flexible regarding the level of obligation you want to set for the projects.

Plus, over the time we learned that nothing in this standard is company-specific, the ESSENCE elements are universal to all application development endeavors.

Stephen Nadin, Fujitsu UK

"In my role in Fujitsu I have ownership of our application process. In addition I manage and work with our Solution Owner and CTO groups who have to define and create solutions across the whole aspect of system design bringing together multiple processes and methods in order to create solutions that will work and meet our customers¹ needs while being costed correctly. In the ever global business we also now need to stitch together different processes and methods from Fujitsu¹s global organization and vast ecosystem of partners.

In this context I believe that having SEMAT is vital to being able to deliver great solutions and ensure that we have a common language for defining and integrating different groups needing to work together to a common goal. Equally it¹s a great way for communicating to end customers and across governance and assurance reviews the state of projects and allowing gaps to be quickly identified and closed in the teams. I strongly believe that this now needs to be brought into industry and embedded as a gold standard and this is the area I want to help drive by joining the SEMAT executive group.²

Sumeet Malhotra, TCS 

In this era of ever increasing complexity, it is critical for any consulting company to curtail costs and unnecessary complexity by simplifying the execution & delivery of software development and business transformation projects for its clients. To do so, the consulting company must distill the core of all related different delivery methodologies to an essential unified set. As that is the foundation of the Essence standard promulgated by the SEMAT group and standardized by the OMG, TCS is very interested in leading the path to getting this done. 
 

Malcolm Herbert, Red Hat

For Red Hat Consulting, Essence in particular provides a common language, between Red Hat and our customers and also between different groups internally. This is important as we are usually working with leading edge, emerging technology, in pilot or startup environments and its important that the consulting team and the organisationworking with us have a common understanding of the problem and possible solutions.

Essence provides a framework for doing this which takes a few hours to set up, rather than days or weeks. 

Essence also has some other benefits for us:
– it provides repeatable practices/activities; reuse ensures quality of delivery and provides a route for onboarding new people to the team.
– means of navigation; knowing where you are in a complex project or in a series of projects. 

The use cases I see may be different from the initial ideas and intentions for SEMAT Essence, but it has potential for Red Hat Consulting, where other design and project management approaches are either wrong or too intrusive.