Explaining Agile to Customers

I came across this on the Agile Blog. It’s something I’ve struggled with in the past, how to explain the Agile approach effectively to your customers

Explaining Agile to Your Customers

Many software companies use Agile techniques but still use fixed-price, fixed-scope contracts because it seems too hard to explain Agile to the your customer. This is a shame, because a lot can be gained by bringing your customer into the Agile process. Here's a way to explain Agile to the person who's buying your software, in plain english, with no jargon.

What do you mean, you're Agile?

We’ll ask you for a high-level list of features you’d like to see us build, and the date you need your first release.

We’ll ask you to sort that list in rank order most valuable features first.

We’ll give you a good-faith estimate of how many of those features we think we can deliver by that date, and we’ll absolutely guarantee you’ll get working tested software that includes your highest-priority features on that date

We’ll work through this list in priority order, asking you for the additional details along the way.

We’ll give you working fully tested software every 2 weeks. You’ll pay for each two-week chunk you get, when you get it.

You can change priorities for features we haven’t started on yet, but we ask that you only do that future 2-week chunks, not work in progress.

Sometimes your idea of a feature is bigger than what we were thinking of. We’re confident we can deliver close to your list of features by your date, but if you have very specific needs around some features, they may take more time than expected. We’ll still meet the release date, but we may need to delay work on some of the low-priority features. We’ll work with you to figure out whether there’s a simpler version of features that might meet your needs. Of course, sometimes features will be easier than we thought, too. We’ll work with you continually to make sure you get the most important features by your date.

If you discover you’ve forgotten to include a critical feature in your initial list, just insert it into its appropriate rank position in the list. Usually this means one or two of your low priority features will fall off the list.

If you discover before your release date that we’ve given you all the features you need, you can cancel future work and release what you’ve got.

If you need more features after your release date, you can request that we keep working on your list, 2 weeks at a time.

Because we’re working with you throughout to make sure we’re building the software you need, we’ll need you to be accessible to answer questions throughout, at least by phone.

Posted by Alex Pukinskis on March 13, 2006 11:21 AM | Permalink