The Essence of Essence
Essence - the next big thing you've never heard of
There are many descriptions of Essence, including?articles,?books,?white papers?and the?Essence Pocket Guide.?
?As befits a powerful, wide reaching approach, they are all quite comprehensive – this is the two minute version that gives you a brief overview with enough information to understand what Essence is about before getting into the detail in one of the more comprehensive works.
At its simplest, Essence is an method-agnostic description of software development. It is an international?OMG?standard developed, reviewed, improved and tested by experts from all over the world. Although developed as a software standard it is far more universal and can be applied to almost any type of solution development.
It has distilled the important elements of software engineering into a universal common ground. That means that any software endeavor can be described in Essence terms, no matter how it is being developed. It also means that any development method or practice can itself be described in Essence terms, usig the Essence Language - a simple, intuitive, visual language.
THE COMMON GROUND
This universal common ground consists of 7 things that all software endeavors need to take account of. Each can be in a number of states from initial conception to retirement. Those seven things are: ? Opportunity ? Stakeholders ? Requirements ? Software System ? Work ? Team ? Way of Working
To successfully create solutions, all these elements must be addressed. This is important because once we have defined this common ground, we can use it to monitor, understand and improve our endeavors, independent of the practices and methods used by the teams. This allows teams to have autonomy over how they work and for organizations to have consistency, even where some teams are practicing waterfall and others practicing Scrum,?SAFe or something else.
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CONSISTENCY FOR ORGANIZATIONS
We can use Essence to describe any practice or method (not only those related to software) and because they are all connected to the same common ground, we can mix and match them to optimize how we work. By standardizing on Essence, organizations don’t need every team to adopt a common method or approach. All they need to do is relate how they work to Essence and it doesn’t matter that they use different approaches on top of it.
CHOICE AND AUTONOMY FOR TEAMS
For individual teams, Essence allows them to find the best practices for their particular needs without having to understand or pick a comprehensive method. Because practices are built on top of Essence, it is easy to see where there are gaps and for the team to ensure they are addressing all the 7 critical areas.
There are other aspects to Essence and many more ways in which it can improve delivery. But its core value is that it describes a universal common ground that is true for all types of software development.
With even this small insight into Essence, it should be clear how ground breaking it is, and how much value it can bring to organizations and teams who want to optimise and improve their approach to delivering value.
For more information, browse the?Essence in Practice website?or get in touch with me.
Performance Coach in Business | Strategy & Flow Agility | Professional & Team Coach (ICF) | Director of Thought Leadership in ICF UK
2 年As long as you are talking about Stakeholders / Requirements / Work - you are aligned into an execution mode. This is a primordial challenge that this seems to accommodate rather than solve and therefore likely to produce equally mediocre results to much of the "scaling" economy. Digital is about bringing technology into business value chains - it is therefore aligning to value and the customer is the only real stakeholder that matters. This is the point that is being missed. It is not about "delivering software", it is about delivering business value using technology. There is a fundamental organisation difference between the two and as far as I can see, this Essence is not even scraping the surface of it.
Architectural Change Management
2 年Thank you Simon! This article is in fact a great elevator pitch for Essence. As I'm mired in the details of Essence too, I know how hard it is to write such a distilled summary.
AUTHENTISCHER IT & DIGITAL STRATEGY ENTHUSIAST | IT & DIGITAL OPERATING MODEL EXPERT | AGILER TRANSFORMATOR
2 年Thank you very much for the essence of Essence. While Essence is an international OMG standard and publicly available it is still not widely known - not to say in use - compared to Scrum or Kanban. It seems to be a very hard sell to organizations. Are there any initiatives to foster and promote its usage in more breadth? Thanx again - Oliver
IT Project Manager at Corporate Digital Transformation at Grupo Santalucia
2 年May I see a few minutes video to understand the benefits with respect to other agile practices, please? I first have to sell it internally... : )
Excellent in a nutshell