Many people recognise the benefits of agile working practices: releasing early, failing early, continuous development – it’s not hard to understand why these might be a good idea. however, organisations may face difficultly implementing modern techniques when the underlying business functions operate in more traditional ways.
How can a development team release a minimum testable product as soon as it’s ready without giving the Marketing department time to prepare? How irritated will the Income Processing Team become if they aren’t given a set date to have ramped up their support staff? Before you know it, you’re forced to work to fixed deadlines with a set budget.
Working at an agency, I see this all the time. Our clients come to us because they recognise the benefit of using subject matter experts; it makes good sense to use people who do this for a living. To win the business, we need to say what we’re going to do (fixed scope and quality) and how much we will do it for (fixed budget). In fact, most of the time, we also need to say when we’re going to do it by (fixed time frames). This scenario inherently lends itself to a traditional waterfall project.
Even with this in mind, our clients also recognise the benefits of releasing early and adapting to change; our clients want to be agile. We’re then immediately faced with the challenge of working iteratively with a set of fixed characteristics. How can we release early and then adapt our approach if we have a set of requirements that can’t change. How can we work to a fixed budget if we don’t yet know what the second, third or fourth release of a product might look like?
This is where collaboration is vital. We cannot work in isolation from our clients; their entire organisation needs to be consulted or at least kept informed. We work with our clients’ various stakeholders to understand the business needs and what is actually important. For example, do our customers need a content workflow from the first moment their website goes live or can this be delivered later in the year when the return of investment is recognised? We rely massively on our customers trusting us and our judgement, driven by experience and knowledge, when it comes to delivering the right solutions in the right way.
Isolated development is really not an option any more; collaboration really seems to be the only way to successfully implement modern techniques.
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