6pm Malta has always been known as an Agile shop, having carried out various high profile Agile rollouts in the UK, Scandinavia, as well as the States and Canada with companies such as British Airways, Verizon and Storebrand.

Agile is, in essence, a philosophy governed by principles aimed at reducing time to market and cost savings. The Agile framework prioritises deliverables and breaks them down into smaller, more manageable pieces of work that can be delivered incrementally to deliver 80 per cent of the business benefit with 20 per cent of the effort required.

Agile must not be mistaken as simply another development methodology or a magic wand! It is not a hard and fast set of rules applicable to every project and it is often the case that certain projects would mandate a hybrid or more traditional approach.

Ivan Bartolo delivered a two-day course to the entire 6pm UK sales team as well as a refresher course for all the company’s project managers last month at the Intercontinental Hotel in St Julian’s.

The course delivered by 6pm was aimed at arming the sales force with the information to identify Agile opportunities and equipping 6pm’s project managers with best practices in order to deliver benefit on time and to budget as opposed to cost on time and to budget!

Mr Bartolo served as International Business Development director on the board of the DSDM (an Agile framework in the UK) consortium for two years back in 2001, becoming one of the world’s top three leading exponents of DSDM and training over 2000 people. He was also responsible for the launch of the DSDM consortium in the USA and Scandinavia.

6pm has also successfully developed its own cutting edge prototyping software, a world-class product – AXLE? Prototyping based on the Agile principles of increasing productivity and reducing time to market. The tool won the 2006 NICTAA award for the IT Product of the year. 6pm is about to launch another product in the AXLE suite AXLE BI

The AXLE? BI powerbase, by 6pm, provides a powerful tool which best manifests itself within an Agile process making use of powerful workshop sessions.

An AXLE BI facilitated workshop guarantees that organisations will be able to reduce the time it takes to place their business intelligence reports in the production environment and enable senior management make more effective “on time” business decisions.