AgileTHIS

When running projects I am often faced with the question: “What will an agile project bring me and my company?”

It is a very common rumor among projectorganisations that agile projectmethods will create fast, cheap and good projects – and parts of that is correct, but many agile coaches neglect to admit the facts for most project – yes it will bring your organisation GOOD projects – but agile and Scrum never promised to make them cheaper or faster. I will try to elaborate a bit on that…

…so what is a good project? A good project in my world is project that brings value to the business fast. It’s a project that shows good results – delivers exactly what the customer needs and within the economic frame and deadline that are set.

In a traditionel project environment we are often faced with the fact that the project itself isn’t delivering value to the customer until at the very end of its lifecycle. It can often be a struggle to complete the project, if the customer is far from to project, since its harder for the customer to quess the outcome of the project. And what is a traditionel project then?!?? Well, I will not go into details about the different projectmethods here,  but lets just say that it’s projects that are not delivering value to the customer along the whole lifecycle. I hereby promise to dig a bit deeper into that on a later post!

So if we look at agile projects and when they deliver businessvalue, there is a a few rules we have to keep in mind about agile projects:

- The customer should always be close to the project and its participants

- The agile project should continously deliver the product in small complete packages at a fast and steady workpace – increments or sprints etc.

If we try to draw up a graph showing the two theories along eachother it will bring up a graph like this:

So the red line shows us how agile projects are bringing businessvalue along the project lifecycle in small increments – or sprints. I havent used curved lines for this, since I wanted to highlight the increments themself – but in a reallife agile project the graph might be a bit more curved.

The green line is the traditionel projects that often only bring businessvalue at the very end when it is delivered/implemented at the customer.

When a customer is close to a project, he or her will often see the value in the endproduct faster, and there is a good chance of them bringing in more money to extend the project lifecycle and thereby the number of features they want. You could say that this approach to a project would bring a higher quality into the final product! This is also why agile projects isnt always cheaper – when the projects are running we often see that budget and deadlines are extended to bring in those extra 10-25% of value for the customer. When saying this, I also would like to point out, that I have actually tried running two project along eachother – one with Scrum and one with waterfall – both went well, but one didnt deliver the wished results, and there was a rather huge gap between the two projects regarding budgets – to Scrums advantage!

So what about risk and the economics behind all this? I will try to elaborate on these subjects on my next post and bring up more graphs to support it.

I hope you enjoyed reading the above!

/Christian