One of the key practices of agile project management is continuous delivery of valuable software into the hands of your customers. Doesn’t that sound cool? Unfortunately, it’s all too common that customers don’t want continuous delivery of software. Why?
There are many reasons why someone wouldn’t want that. It might take too much time to educate your users continuously. Or continuous change to the system might disrupt daily production. These might all be good reasons to delay delivery to once every month (or 2, or 3). Please note, it does not mean you should stop looking for ways to increase the pace in which the organisation can digest change (after all, we prefer shorter time scales).
Recently someone asked “can’t we just postpone this software release with another year to implement many more features?” Of course we could, but why would someone want that? The answer was simple: project funding. Many organisations fund projects to deliver software. When the software is delivered, the project is over. No more funding, no more people, no more project. The software is transferred to a maintenance contract and you might be lucky to have 1 or 2 RFC’s approved in the next 10 years.
If an organisation works this way, it makes perfect sense to order as many features as you can think of, and delay delivery as long as possible. Because you know that extra funding is only negotiable as long as the software isn’t live yet. Your boss will consider your project “done” as soon as the software hits production. Good Bye Budget.
This problem can only be solved on a strategic level. Management should rethink their attitude to project funding. It might make perfect sense for an organisation to have software delivered after a month, and keep the project funded for another year. Such a change would make your entire organisation much more agile (buzzword alert!). Agile project management is much more about these kind of changes than introducing daily standups, pair programming and taskboards.
How does your organisation fund projects? And do you consider that agile?
Picture taken under Creative Commons license from jayneandd’s photo stream.
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