Contracting for Agile engagements

Businesses often mistake Agile project engagements to mean ‘two-week delivery sprints’ alone. The framework of an Agile contract demands a lot more.

‘Angkor Wat’ (Hindu-Buddhist Temples), Cambodia. Two trees joined in the root like the trees in the film Avataar. The idea is to look at inter-connectedness of culture, processes and contracts.

Since our Agile journey started in 2010 i’ve often come across situations where business owners looking to engage Srijan for projects have asked for ‘fixed-cost’ and ‘fixed-outcomes’ during the RFP or negotiation phase itself.

This is a sure-shot recipe for a disaster, or, if outcomes are delivered both the business and vendor would be left with a deeply stressed relationship. Any successful Agile engagement, on the contrary, demands the following framework for success:

1. Separation of the ‘discovery’ of a project from the overall project. Treating the ‘discovery project’ as a paid consulting assignment and having an agreement with the vendor-partner on clearly defined deliverables and outcomes
2. An understanding that the discovery exercise may not uncover all the unknowns of a project. And therefore an openness is needed for such unknowns to be discovered and captured as one goes along in the project, and consequentially will necessarily have to have a budget and time allocated for deliver these.
3. Ensure there is a good product owner at the customer side who owns the project backlog — i) prepared during the discovery and ii) through the course of the development phase
4. Staffing both the business’ internal team and the outsourced vendor team appropriately — and treating them as one team.
5. Ensuring strong processes via tools are in place for transparency, continuous delivery and success. A two-week delivery, demo and testing cycle is extremely important as part of this process.
6. This cannot be achieved without the team being staffed with the right roles and the right size. Hence, please staff the team appropriately.
7. Ensuring a strong CI/CD environment and processes are in place.
8. Building for one (or more) hardening sprints. There will always be bugs even in a two-week development and demo cycle and this is the phase of the project that must address this.
9. Planning for a ‘support phase’. And once again, budgeting for the right roles and right size for managing the team.

A vendor-partner who is focussed on delivering business outcomes and not only winning your business with claims of fixed-cost pricing, will almost always insist on such a framework while getting into an engagement. Or they may be willing to walk-away from the project opportunity.

Digital transformation engagements require such partners. Insist on working with such partners.