Coming back to S&P, Gill says when major projects are delivered at the end of a six-month development cycle the testing suffers and corners are cut. Often the testing doesn't focus on the areas of the product that would deliver the most value. "It is not realising anything. Continuous integration means continual. We are integrating every two to four weeks. It's almost like a mini-project that is continually ready for production."

The same behaviour works for software documentation. Gill admits that most is three years out of date because it's written when the application is completed, but as the application is updated, no one updates the documentation. At S&P he tells his team to produce documentation, "but just enough", so that it can react to change.

S&P also benefits from an IT division that is as tightly integrated as its software. "We work as a team and we are constantly improving what we're doing." The end result for Gill is something that is still elusive for many organisations, but not at S&P. "Technology has had to learn the business to be able to collaborate. So we've had to learn what is the business that we are in and we've spent a lot of time really understanding the business and the value for the business."

Gill makes it all sound so easy, and asked how he broaches the subject with the board he responds, "They're looking at the financial figures, and they're looking at the investment return, but there's not a huge deal of investment, other than time on training and deliberating how we deliver. They get the code quicker. It is a no-brainer really."

He admits Agile methods only work if the board has bought into the idea. "If you don't have a really close relationship with business you are going to struggle." To get that business buy-in, Gill hosts planning meetings where it is made clear that IT is a partner and "not simply a cost centre". Gill's team are enjoying the change as well.

"IT doesn't feel like these techie guys sitting in the middle," he says because the business people are now engaged with them. A team building exercise Gill has introduced is stand-ups. "Every morning we stand up with our IT team, and we ask three questions. The leader of that stand-up group will tell everyone what they did yesterday, what they will achieve today and what impediments they have. It takes 10 minutes, business users are invited and Gill is a strong believer in the constant stream of communication it creates.

Listening to Gill you'd think he was a long-term follower of Agile. "It was introduced in a previous organisation I worked at and I was really anti it, if I'm honest." Being a traditional development person he was concerned that planning and milestones were going to suffer." Despite his talk of board level buy-in, Gill found a lot of the adoption was from the bottom up. "What I would advise is to take a small project and team and just go and try it."

Janice McGinn is The 451 Group's research director.