Scope Like a Butterfly, Sprint for a Fee - Selling Agile

Agile approaches to software development usually make sense to people who've experienced the alternatives, but can seem alien to clients who are expected to abandon apparent certainty for certain uncertainty.

Difficulty: General
Session Track: Safe for Managers,Team

Session Detail

While a lot has been written about implementing agile practices, most of it brushes over the task of convincing clients and stakeholders that it's a good idea to do so. What's missing is a discussion on how to set expectations at the engagement level to reflect the fundamentally different value proposition an agile solution presents. Over the last year RocketBoots has been dealing with a transition to Scrum, taking along our existing clients and picking up new ones along the way.

In this presentation Robin will talk about:

Using agile from the get-go in proposals to new clients
Helping clients understand what they don't know
Estimates
Migrating existing clients from traditional approaches
Structuring contracts, statements of work and payment schedules
'Claytons' agile - compromises that are agile in spirit if not in name

Expect stretched but memorable analogies, cartoons, war stories and some useful thoughts to bring to your next agile-ish project.

Speakers

Robin Hilliard (Rocketboots, Australia)

Robin Hilliard is founder and CTO of RocketBoots, an innovative technology company providing advisory, application development and hard science services to some of Australia's leading organisations. From mobile apps and robots to RIAs, publishing workflow and computer vision applications, RocketBoots is out to prove that great software can change the world. More...