Financial outsourcer HML has released its second white paper.

Entitled ‘Agile IT: A value driven approach to IT delivery’, the paper documents the firm’s ‘agile’ approach to IT development.

Agile is a way of working that encourages developers to build in flexibility to adapt to change as it materialises throughout a project. Results are delivered in regular iterations and the focus is on solving a problem, rather than a traditional ‘waterfall’ method where the end goal is creating a pre-defined product.

Some of the benefits delivered for HML’s clients through agile software development include increased throughput, reduced time to deliver value, greater flexibility and responsiveness to changing needs and improved stakeholder and client satisfaction.

Agile was introduced to HML three years ago to transform the company’s software development function to deliver faster and more relevant solutions to clients.

“We’ve seen real benefits through our adoption of agile that we want to share with other businesses,” said Kim Brien, HML’s IT director.

“Such has been the success of the programme that visitors began calling it ‘Agile IT’ as if it was HML’s invention. Although we’ve just applied recognised agile methodologies to our situation, the name has stuck and I think we have developed a unique way of working in an industry that has typically used waterfall methods in the past.

“It has been a cultural change in HML. Anyone else looking to deliver more value for their customers in software or product development by turning existing processes on their head could learn something from this white paper.”