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Last year Agile coach Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to strive for creative solutions instead of simply cutting scope.
In large organizations and projects, it's not unusual for an Agile team to find itself shackled to a non-Agile partner/vendor/supplier. Friction ensues, energy is wasted. While the solution might appear to be: "hire better teams", Scott Ambler goes to the root of the problem, providing a strategy for creating better RFPs: ones that attract Agile teams.
While the Agile Manifesto says "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation", contracts are a reality for many developers and firms. Peter Stevens has analyzed 10 different types of development contracts, shedding light on how well each style fits an agile project. He has uncovered a couple that seem to fit much better than either fixed-price or time-and-materials.
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
Contracts are the seam that tie together different organizations. Traditional contracts are based on mistrust and a CYA philosophy. Fixed price contracts don't take into consider the uncertainty of software development. Time-for-money projects are not based on value delivered - a team can work for a long time and not have much to show for. The Agile community is looking for something better.
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.
In Harvard Business Online this week, Donald L Sull and Charles Spinosa wrote about the practice Promise Based Management - using promised commitments in the organisation to enable organisational agiity, encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate collaboration.
In a recent newsletter, Scott Ambler looked at why fixed price projects tend to overrun and often fail to solve the business problems they set out to conquer. Scott named the key problems in fixed price projects, identified the bad habits they encourage for customers and developers, and ended with a call to revisit how we fund our IT projects, offering an alternative.
On the high-volume ScrumDevelopment newsgroup, an interesting question has appeared, once again: "Is it possible to run SCRUM with fixed price contracts especially custom projects?". Ron Jeffries, Mike Beedle and others offer replies from experience.
