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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.
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.
