We are partnering with relevant industry leading intellectual property owners to add their knowledge to the rapidly expanding eco-system of Essence based Practices. Being available in the eco-system means those practices get greater exposure. Practice consumers are able to select the new practices and compose them with others to create bespoke methods easily, or extend existing methods with them as needed.
Join our growing network of Essence Partners!
What does Jeff Sutherland say?
“I worked with Ivar Jacobson International to leverage the Essence Industry standard to capture the essential elements. I use the cards in many of my Scrum training courses today and they prove to be very popular with both students and training partners. The cards add exercises and interactive games to enhance the learning experience.
If you want to accelerate your Scrum adoption and understanding, you can get your own Essential Scrum Cards and bring the Scrum Guide to life”
Jeff Sutherland
Co-Creator of Scrum
Nigel Thurlow
“I’m really excited to see how IJI’s tooling and Essentialization of the Flow System will help provide a different lens that teams can use to understand and apply its practices”, said Nigel Thurlow, CEO of The Flow Consortium. “Where the TFS Playbook provides education combined with practical advice and worksheets for the methods, techniques, and tools in The Flow System, the Essence approach activates them through gameplaying and adds an intuitive way to engage with them. I think that Ivar Jacobson’s Essence truly complements the approach Prof. John Turner and I take with the Flow System, and we’re excited to work together with IJI on this collaboration!”.
Scott Ambler
“I am extremely excited about working together to Essentialize some of the practices in the Agile Data and Agile Modeling methods to help make them available to a wider audience, make them more trainable, and make them more implementable”, said Scott Ambler, CEO and founder of Ambysoft Inc. “At Ambysoft, we are all about developing and providing Effective Practices for Software Solution Delivery. The Essence Kernel and Language provide the perfect “industry standard” foundation upon which to render those assets so that they can combine seamlessly with contributions from other leaders in our industry to accelerate and professionalize the endeavor of software solution delivery. With the ecosystem that we’re seeing around Essence, with everything from the practitioner to training/teaching and academic points of view, teaching this to the students, is absolutely critical, and I think Essence is there and has a huge advantage over pretty much everything else.”
Ken Pugh
Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and Ken Pugh Inc. are delighted to announce a partnership to describe the practices of Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) using the Essence of Software Engineering Kernel and Language.
“I am delighted to collaborate with Ivar Jacobson to Essentialize these key practices which are a primary focus of our training and consulting”, said Ken Pugh, CEO of Ken Pugh Inc. “The Essence standard with the poker-sized card paradigm is an excellent medium that helps companies apply serious gameplay to develop software effectively using these practices. At Ken Pugh Inc. we are all about helping teams deliver business value quickly by removing waste and delays in value streams. So we support anything that helps accelerate the learning cycle and bridges the gap between learning and delivery.
Joakim Sundén
Ivar Jacobson (IJI) and Joakim Sundén are delighted to announce a partnership to describe the Spotify Model to help people better understand what it is, and using Essence as an enabler, evolve the industries understanding of how it can be of value.
“Collaborating with IJI and working with the Essence language to crystallize the core principles of the Spotify model has been really valuable” said Joakim Sundén, (Crisp AB Partner). “This synergy aims to demystify the model’s application, enhancing its accessibility and user-friendliness. Leveraging the robust foundation of the Essence Kernel and Language, we’re primed to weave these principles and practices with invaluable insights from industry leaders. Given the growing traction of Essence across both hands-on applications and academia, it underscores the immense potential of the Essence ecosystem as a platform for disseminating knowledge in such domains”.
Paul McMahon
“I’m really excited for the opportunity to move my Essence “thinking-framework” practices into IJI’s tooling and make them available to the broader software and systems engineering community through the growing Essence-based Eco-system” , said Paul E. McMahon. “Most of my clients come from the US Department of Defense industry and already have mature practices. What they want are very specific improvements to their existing way of working, such as making their practices more cybersecure and cyber-resilient. I teach them how to use the Essence framework to get rapid and measurable performance improvement in the areas they know they need help,” McMahon said. “As a result, some of my clients have started referring to my Essence “thinking-framework” practices as Consulting 101. Specifically, I teach my clients how to use the Essence standard checklists in what I refer to as ‘stealth mode’ to help them isolate the root cause of their problems.”
Stefan Malich
“When I got under the skin of the OMG Essence standard, I realized that it had the potential to become a game changer for the software engineering discipline.” said Stefan Malich, founder of Dr. Stefan Malich | Architectural Change Management. “As architectural concepts and practices usually inform and enrich other software engineering practices, there is a necessity to integrate and orchestrate multiple practices. Moreover, it is a challenge to identify and select the right architectural practices according to the context and objectives of a specific software engineering endeavor. These requirements are inherently supported by the OMG Essence standard. Therefore, architectural practices and Essence are a perfect fit. The Essence-based descriptions of the architectural practices are key to the growing practice eco-system and will be of benefit to many software engineering endeavors.”
Dave Snowden
(Announcement from the World Agility Forum Lisbon Sep 2022)
Over the past years CynefinCo and Ivar Jacobson International have each been working on initiatives with very similar goals and underlying philosophies. CynefinCo and partners have been working on an open source, vendor independent approach to Agile that allows for a multi-vendor, multi-framework approach to creating agility in companies. Meanwhile, the Essence Standard, conceived by Ivar Jacobson and developed by SEMAT community and adopted by OMG (Object Management Group), has been growing in popularity as an approach describing and democratizing practices used predominantly in the development community.
Both approaches are based on the principles of scaling by decomposition and recombination - they both see practices as independent citizens that should be shared and considered separately, not hidden inside method prisons. Supported by facilitation kits and training, they allow a best of breed approach to be adopted over Scrum, Kanban, Spotify, DevOps, XP as well as the various scaled frameworks. There is no vendor lockin and the approaches allow for innovation of methods and tools in the agile space by small and large companies alike.
The similarity between these two approaches has been observed by others for some time, with both Dave and Ivar each being encouraged to meet and compare their ideas. When we did so, we realized not just how similar the approaches are, but how they complement each other perfectly. Essence’s practices map onto Hexis, providing richness of content and ready-made decomposition to the next layer down; and the breadth of Hexis in the complex domain offer insights that will be invaluable to those coming from a systems development perspective.
For these reasons, we are delighted that we can announce that we are working together, bringing Essence and Hexis together, with each complementing one another and making the other better. Combing the two approaches provides a rich set of practice Hexis that complement the base set, and a language that makes creating and describing practices to be used with Hexis easier and more effective. We are also talking with other communities and organisations in the wider agile movement who will also be partners in this initiative.
This as a great move forward for the industry.
Why Essentialize?
If you desire to see industry improvements in the design, communication and usage of working practices, and you own intellectual property, then Essentialization is for you! The Essence standard is a great foundation for describing practices in a common way so:
- As an industry we can get rid of many “crazy things” such as methods war, Gurus instead of experts and no common ground.
- Your methods and practices become Active through serious games rather than simply passive.
- They can be added to an ever increasing eco-system of Practices driving the industry forward.
- The software development industry can move from primarily being a craft to being an engineering discipline.
- Your methods or practices will be AI ready since AI+Essence >> AI
Please visit Ivar’s LinkedIn article, The Practice of Being Agile for a more in-depth look at the killer use cases of Essence!
Ultimately, with Essentialization, your ideas will reach wider audiences.
What's in it for the collaborators? The Objectives
By collaborating with IJI to Essentialize your IP, effectively you are contributing to industry efforts to help teams develop better, faster, cheaper and happier; allowing organizations to mix and match the best of the best to improve performance. You are also raising awareness of both the Essence standard and putting your work in a new global shop-window of best practice that can boost your lead generation capabilities. We will promote your work and we also want to share potential revenue with you. Let’s talk about it…
What happens - how does it work?
It’s easy to get going. Fill out the form to the right, and we’ll then discuss together and make a simple Essentialization partnership agreement. You provide your base IP in whatever format you have it, along with the brains that understand it. We provide the Essence experts and all the Essence based productivity tooling required to make light work of the Essentialization. We collaborate together and share the work. We announce the partnership and start promoting the outputs. We publish your practices and they join the ever growing eco-system of practices for the world to see. You get the credit for them and the recognition. It is IMPORTANT to point out that at no point does ownership of your IP change. The Essentialization effort is about change of format, not change of ownership. All IP is yours to retain, including the Practices that are the output of the collaboration.
Essence Quotes
Essence
Ken Pugh, CEO, Ken Pugh Inc.
I am delighted to collaborate with Ivar Jacobson to Essentialize these key practices which are a primary focus of our training and consulting, said Ken Pugh, CEO of Ken Pugh Inc. The Essence standard with the poker-sizer card paradigm is an excellent medium that helps companies apply serious gameplay to develop software effectively using these practices. At Ken Pugh Inc. we are all about helping teams deliver business value quickly by removing waste and delays in value streams. So we support anything that helps accelerate the learning cycle and bridges the gap between learning and delivery.
Essence
Joakim Sundén, Consultant, Keynote Speaker, Spotify Model Evangelist
Collaborating with Essence to crystallize the core principles of the Spotify model has been immensely valuable. This synergy aims to demystify the model's application, enhancing its accessibility and user-friendliness. Leveraging the robust foundation of the Essence Kernel and Language, we're primed to weave these principles and practices with invaluable insights from industry leaders. Given the growing traction of Essence across both hands-on applications and academia, it underscores the immense potential of the Essence ecosystem as a platform for disseminating knowledge in such domains.
Essence
Nigel Thurlow, CEO, The Flow Consortium
I’m really excited to see how IJI’s tooling and Essentialization of the Flow System will help provide a different lens that teams can use to understand and apply its practices. Where the TFS Playbook provides education combined with practical advice and worksheets for the methods, techniques, and tools in The Flow System, the Essence approach activates them through gameplaying and adds an intuitive way to engage with them. I think that Ivar Jacobson’s Essence truly complements the approach Prof. John Turner and I take with the Flow System, and we’re excited to work together with IJI on this collaboration!
Essence
Jeff Sutherland, Co-Creator of Scrum
I worked with Ivar Jacobson International to leverage the Essence Industry standard to capture the essential elements. I use the cards in many of my Scrum training courses today and they prove to be very popular with both students and training partners. The cards add exercises and interactive games to enhance the learning experience. If you want to accelerate your Scrum adoption and understanding, you can get your own Essential Scrum Cards and bring the Scrum Guide to life
Essence
Scott Ambler, CEO and founder, Ambysoft Inc.
I am extremely excited about working together to Essentialize some of the practices in the Agile Data and Agile Modelling methods to help make them available to a wider audience, make them more trainable, and make them more implementable. At Ambysoft, we are all about developing and providing Effective Practices for Software Solution Delivery. The Essence Kernel and Language provide the perfect “industry standard” foundation upon which to render those assets so that they can combine seamlessly with contributions from other leaders in our industry to accelerate and professionalize the endeavor of software solution delivery. With the ecosystem that we’re seeing around Essence, with everything from the practitioner to training/teaching and academic points of view, teaching this to the students, is absolutely critical, and I think Essence is there and has a huge advantage over pretty much everything else.