The Agile Sustainability Initiative is an effort to create awareness about sustainability within the Agile community and explore how Agile can contribute to a more sustainable future. The initiative aims to achieve this through various activities, including providing the following:
- knowledge
- inspiration
- tools
- alliances
- case studies
- experience reports
- skills network
- guidance
Our goal is to help Agile Alliance members leverage their influence to “leave the place better than how we found it.”
A little context
The challenges facing the planet are existential, and it is essential for all communities, including the Agile community, to get involved in addressing them.
- As a species, we are currently consuming 1.8 Earths (reference)
- Just the internet creates 900 million tons of Co2/year. (reference)
- In 2019, 53.6 million metric tonnes of electronic waste was generated worldwide (that’s plus 21% in 5 years.) This is the equivalent of almost 5,400 Eiffel towers. (reference)
- We’ve converted 75% of the land that is not covered by ice. (reference)
Facts like those above are, unfortunately, endless. Yet, there is hope.
All these challenges (and many more) are addressed by the United Nations’ seventeen sustainable development goals. We must translate these ideas into actionable steps and make them tangible for everything and everyone we’re involved with, including our teams, products, and organizations.
The Agile community is filled with practitioners who have experience doing exactly that: tackling complex and wicked problems. The Agile sustainability initiative aims to leverage this experience to create a more sustainable future.
We are here to provide knowledge and inspiration to empower the broader Agile community to take ACTION on sustainability.
What’s next
The Agile Sustainability Initiative is an opportunity for the Agile community to come together and make a difference. By sharing knowledge and experience, the initiative hopes to create a sustainable future that benefits everyone.
This is an invitation to sign up and get involved in creating a better world for ourselves and future generations. In the near future, we will be sharing with you the facts, challenges, and calls to action that you need to pay attention to in order to make a difference.
Every act matters, and everyone has something to contribute to creating a nature-positive and regenerative society.
So, roll up your sleeves, and join the tribe!
About the Authors
Agile Coach and Salesforce MVP, helping organisations to become more agile whilst delivering Salesforce technology. Latest invention: www.theagileretrospectivegame.com
Empowering business to evolve digitally at a scale. On a mission to increase productivity, transparency and collaboration with Agile mindset.
Signature Themes from The Gallup Organization: Learner, Input, Individualization, Activator and Intellection.
Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large-distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently co-created an assessment for (agile) teams to gauge the environmental, social, and economic impact of their products and services. Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova and pair-written with John Buck), Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.
Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds an M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as a pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.
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Dr. Claudia Melo is currently an Enterprise Agile Coach/Software Engineer with an International Organization (United Nations) and Advisory board member at Mulheres na Tecnologia (/MNT). Over the past 20 years, Claudia has joined different organizations with a focus on software engineering, connecting delivery, research and education. She conducts extensive work in Agile Methods/DevOps and Organization Design in collaboration with companies, universities, entrepreneurs, government and international organisations. She was ThoughtWorks’ Global Head of Tech Learning Development, member of the Technology Advisory Board, and CTO for Latin America. Since 2016, she has been working on ICT for Sustainability topics, aligned to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Claudia received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo (USP), in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Besides contributing to scientific research, books, and industry reports, in 2015, she received the USP Outstanding Thesis Award.
This is an Agile Alliance community blog post. Opinions represented
are personal and belong solely to the author. They do not represent opinion or policy of Agile Alliance.
