ADP ’08: Agile Contracting

November 12th, 2008 · 6 Comments · Conference Reports

Rachel Weston and I gave a talk on Agile Contracting today at ADP. Here’s a quick summary, the slide deck and the handout we gave to our session attendees. Many software development organizations work within the bounds of contractual agreements where the limitations imposed by the “Iron Triangle” of fixed timelines, budgets, and scope challenge their ability to embrace change and focus on value delivery. Agile practitioners often comment that agile contracting is a difficult problem, but proven solutions are rarely presented. In our session, Rachel and I offered some tools that we have used in our own agile contracting work to help agile practitioners deal with different contracting scenarios while promoting agile practices, protecting the development organization, and still providing value and protection to the client’s organization. We conducted a combined workshop and facilitated collaborative session, and presented new agile contracting tools that can be added to your toolbox. Hopefully, we offered practical solutions for dealing with contracts in an agile manner. Here’s the deck and the handout:

View SlideShare presentation

6 comments so far ↓

1 PINGBACK // Nov 12, 2008 at 3:11 pm

PINGBACK http://rare.tumblr.com/post/59405372/adp-08-agile-contracting

…Making a business case for agile contracting…
2 Jim Barry // Nov 12, 2008 at 3:14 pm

Slide deck not intended to stand-alone I’m sure, so just to get my head around it can I start by summarizing like this?:

“Conventional contracting is an iron triangle. Agile contracting flexes the ‘scope’ corner of this triangle. Tighten iterations and increase feedback loops so that the client has control throughout the process over what’s delivered (and not delivered) at the end due to this scope flexing.”

Important details aside, did I catch the gist of it? Thanks again for sharing this. Nice graphics!
3 Chris // Nov 12, 2008 at 3:40 pm

Jim, thanks for the comment. If anyone needs the notes for the deck, please visit SlideShare directly at http://www.slideshare.net/cspag67/contracting-for-agile-software-development-presentation/. For some reason, the notes don’t come along with the deck when you embed it in WordPress. Enjoy!
4 Abbas Mirza // Nov 12, 2008 at 9:12 pm

Would like to invite you to join our Agile Group at: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/81780

Regards,
Abbas
5 PINGBACK // Nov 16, 2008 at 12:07 pm

PINGBACK http://agilemusings.com/?p=25

…Great presentation from Chris Spagnuolo and Rachel Weston from Rally on Agile Contracting. Check out Chris’s site for great Agile advice…
6 Yves Hanoulle // Dec 1, 2008 at 5:14 am

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe wrote two papers on Agile Fixed price projects a few years ago that is interesting for this also:
http://www.nayima.be/html/fixedpriceprojects.pdf
http://www.nayima.be/html/agilefixedprice.pdf