Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Changing the Game: Making Agile the "Default Methodology"
Posted on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:09:07 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: Agile

Over the weekend I was talking with a friend who's company had recently been invited to a finalist interview for a large state contract. As a company, they have been adopting agile with good results, despite the fact that most of their current contracts are fixed price - fixed deliverable.

For a while now they have been looking for agile contracts, but none have come up. So they decided to change the game. They went into the finalist interview, and in addition to presenting their qualifications, experience, and proposed solution, they also did a quick presentation on their project management methodology (Scrum + Selective XP Techniques). No discussion of why it's better than waterfall - just "this is how we do things".

Given that state agencies are not known for embracing change, it was a gutsy move, but it paid off and they won the contract. Now they have a great contract, and can run it in a sensible way.

I love this story - it's very "Seth Godin" - do things differently to get the results you want! They were sick of fixed price projects but were not seeing many requests for agile, so they changed the rules. Instead of trying to "win" a client over to using agile, they just stated "we use agile". Period. They made it the default position.

In addition to winning, it also sets them up for more success. By writing up a case-study about how the project worked, they can show both their success in the vertical market and how agile can be successful in one of the most challenging environments - state government. And that can be used to win over other, possibly skeptical clients.

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