William Hill - a name that all of us are familiar with, if not from participating in their gaming and leisure offering, then at least from the high visibility that William Hill secured themselves. One of the world’s leading betting and gaming companies, William Hill would not have gotten to where they are today without a high focus on technology and its continuous improvement.

A fair number of years ago, in 2007, William Hill was working on upgrading their website through a NextGen technology programme, using their in-house people. Despite the internal effort, the failure of the programme to produce desired results has led to the NextGen programme being shut down, leading to a £26 million write-off.

The objective of the programme had been to move the company from traditional legacy systems onto a modern IT infrastructure, allowing the company to become more competitive by being more UI and UX focused. William Hill wanted to offer new and improved services, and to respond to customer needs. While the target was ambitious, the project failed on delivering on its objectives.

When the FT.com starts recommending agile approaches you know it’s time to sit up and take notice.

In business environments, professionals are still questioning if agile scales at the portfolio level, when in fact the answer is quite clear - yes it does. However, I am still seeing immature practices and behaviours at this level of the organisation.

The first SAFe Leadership was held between 26-29 May in Crieff, Scotland.

SAFe Leadership had the stated aims of:

• Share ideas and experiences from a broad range of SAFe practitioners
• Provide input into the direction of SAFe
• Build our community.

Over 40 thought leaders from around the globe, including America, Brazil, Australia, Israel and Europe descended on Crieff in Scotland for the inaugural SAFe Leadership retreat to discuss latest thinking, the imminent release of SAFe 4.0 and the new ideas in the Cost of Delay.

As Radtac has many banking clients, this blog post has been written from the perspective that we are part of the retail banking community.

“I’m not so sure that I want my bank to be ‘innovative’ with my money.” Isn’t it this kind of attitude that got us into mixed investment banks and retail banks in the first place? The challenge of casino banking using deposits from customers who just didn’t realise what was going on. So thanks, but no thanks.

Well I’m not talking about that type of innovation – because that isn’t innovation, it’s gaming and betting. I am talking about innovation that delivers valued services to the customer. The omni-channel “know your customer” banking that we are already taking part in on our smartphones and tablets.

Peter Measey, CEO of Radtac and editor of BCS book, Agile Foundations, reviews three areas which he predicts will see significant growth this year in the agile arena.

The penultimate blog in our Agile Predictions series is from COO and Head of Radtac Culture, Michael Short. He predicts that the culture of organisations will move away from traditional control methods to environmental in 2015. This will support and cultivate collaborative working.

The third instalment of our 2015 Agile predictions comes from Tom Sedge, Management Consultant & Agile/Lean Coach at Radtac.

The second instalment of our 2015 Agile predictions comes from Simon Powers, Agile / Architecture - Transformation Coach. Simon's predictions include the growth of Agile consultancy in 2015, and even greater infiltration of Lean practices.

2014 has been an amazing year for Agile adoption. The methodology has taken centre stage, not just in the delivery of IT, but as a proven management solution in other sectors, such as marketing.

As pure-play agilists, we advocate the removal of long-term complicated planning into shorter, value-driven iterative steps, validated by earlier customer feedback. So, it was an ironically difficult task for Radtac team members to look ahead into the next 12 months and share their 2015 industry predictions.