For today’s Agile Tuesday as part of the Modernization Readiness Boot Camp, has your leadership team expressed one of these common concerns about agile projects? Use these answers to make the case for introducing agile development to your next modernization project.
Concern 1 – Long Timelines
The main concern one may have with timelines is that typically the timelines can run longer than is traditionally planned for non-agile projects (such as waterfall). However, agile prepares for the inevitable changes that are going to be requested once a project is underway. It gracefully handles these scenarios, which as a result causes agile to be longer than a traditional project.
If there’s a strict delivery date, agile is dynamic and may create timeline anxiety. It’s tougher to adhere to stricter schedules throughout the agile development process. You’ll need to be flexible and remember that with a traditional model, what you would get isn’t what you really wanted. Using agile, you know that the product you’re actually getting is what you wanted.
Following a traditional development lifecycle will result in unexpected issues, change requests, and unplanned changes as these unexpected updates to the project will always occur. Agile will handle these changes fluidly in a smooth process. A waterfall process with a strict timeline will need an extention to resolve these changes along the way. This results in change requests and additional bureaucracy.
Concern 2 – Agile Costs More
The benefits of agile will prevent you from having to go back in the long-run. With a fixed development processes that was defined a year go, sometimes the features and development is longer valid, and the resulting projects are already accruing technical debt.
One cost concern may be agile certification. Team members who are Scrum certified may cost you more, but you’re getting the job done right. You’re not taking a shortcut on someone who’s trained in agile. Pay upfront because the value is there. These employees are worth the cost in the long run.
Longer timelines that are planned for with agile leaders may amount to an increase in costs. However, extended timelines also occur with traditional development because changes will inevitably happen. Agile will bring changes into the product’s development life cycles without issues with change requests. Changes and new features would be implemented as if they were planned from the beginning.
Waterfall development means an immediate pushback on recommended or requested changes. These changes will then inevitably be shoved into the backlog, taking months to a year to introduce that feature, which means more costs anyway.
Concern 3 – We Don’t Have Agile Talent
The concern of not having internal talent is relieved by the fact that you don’t necessarily need in-house agile talent.
Partner with an expert and find the right people to lead the process. Your developers shouldn’t notice much difference in day-to-day work life. As long as the Scrum master can guide the team on the tasks they need to complete on a sprint-by-sprint basis, there isn’t a substantial learning curve for a majority of the individuals involved.