Emergn Partners with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

-- VFQ: A new Agile Certification to help Business and IT

NEW YORK and LONDON, April 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Emergn, a global professional services company, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, to provide its work-based education program, VFQ (Value, Flow, Quality®) as the foundation to deliver a new and advanced program that will certify Agile practitioners.

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A new certification program to support organizations and IT professionals

Over the last decade, Agile development methods have become increasingly popular around the world. Organizations have seen major benefits from adopting tools, practices and methodologies, but until now, the industry has lacked a systematic approach to training and education. The resulting dependence on external coaches of variable quality has left organizations struggling to develop the necessary skills.

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has been considering how it can best help businesses and IT professionals, and it has selected Emergn as its partner to deliver an internationally-recognized Practitioner Level of the new Agile Professional Certification.

The skills organizations need today

VFQ understands that Agile is not the end in itself – the bottom line is that businesses need to deliver more value, flow and quality. The course provides a thorough grounding in the best way to deliver IT-based products and services. It provides a deep understanding of Agile practices, including Scrum and Kanban. It also offers solutions to challenges that traditional training merely touches on: – how to build a high-performance team; different methods to help prioritize; balancing the trade-offs between cost and speed; how to improve flow throughout the organization and much more.

Continuous learning and a deeper level of understanding

The Agile Professional Certification is built according to the latest thinking in education. With VFQ, learners engage, remember and apply new ideas far more effectively. Rather than offering a superficial 'how to' set of instructions, VFQ helps learners develop their skills at a much deeper level. New ideas are then put into practice through a series of activities and work-based projects. Over the past year, VFQ has been successfully adopted by both private and public sector organizations around the world, including Maersk Line and DFID (The Department for International Development in the UK).

Charles Agnew, CIO for The Department for International Development said "VFQ has brought a tremendous amount of value to our adoption of more agile ways of working. Its unique work-based approach helps our people develop their capability whilst adding value to the project directly, solving their own problems and really learning about the principles of Agile software delivery. The industry has been in need of a benchmark and quality standard for some time.  I'm delighted that BCS and Emergn have made this possible using VFQ. This will help more organizations transform the way they work with IT and provide a quality standard that allows us to know we are developing the right capability."

Helping business transform

Martyn Lambert, Chief Executive Officer, BCS Learning & Development Ltd explains: "We have always been committed to developing capability in all roles and responsibilities to help the industry improve. We knew there was a real need for an in-depth and expert course that would really help IT professionals achieve the grade of certification required in Agile. We are delighted to be working with Emergn on this which dovetails with the aims of our skills and competency framework, SFIAplus."

Alex Adamopoulos, Chief Executive Officer of Emergn adds: "We're delighted to partner with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. From our experience we know how businesses need to develop the right skills if they are to make Agile work for them and deliver on its potential. Indeed, we decided to create VFQ because we continued to hear from our clients that traditional training or coaching just wasn't enough. It has been exciting to see individuals and organizations around the world learn from VFQ and begin to implement new practices and build on them. With the new BCS program, we hope to see more and more organizations realize the benefits of Agile and develop their own capacity for change."

About Emergn

Emergn is a global professional services company that solves the business problems in IT and the IT problems in business. We work with organizations to deliver the unique solutions they need for their specific concerns. To do that, we blend Agile and Lean principles in consulting, delivery and education – believing that in these three ways we can best help organizations transform their own, and their people's, capabilities. The result for our clients is to deliver value, flow and quality.

Emergn has worked with an impressive list of organizations, including British Airways, Maersk, UK Public Sector, British Telecom Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, McGraw Hill, Thomson Reuters, and Bank of America.

Emergn is based in Boston, New York, London and Dublin.

For more information, visit www.emergn.com or follow Emergn on Twitter at http://twitter.com/emergn

About BCS

For more information and to register interest in the program visit www.bcs.org/agile

Our mission as BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is to enable the information society.  We promote wider social and economic progress through the advancement of information technology science and practice.  We bring together industry, academics, practitioners and government to share knowledge, promote new thinking, inform the design of new curricula, shape public policy and inform the public.

Our vision is to be a world-class organization for IT. Our 70,000 strong membership includes practitioners, businesses, academics and students in the UK and internationally. We deliver a range of professional development tools for practitioners and employees.  A leading IT qualification body, we offer a range of widely recognized qualifications.

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