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Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
One of the companies that I am working with is a software developer that requires a professional services team to complement its software at client sites. Some of the PMs in the professional services team felt that the nature of the work leant itself to an agile approach to an implementation. They may well be correct, but it raises an interesting question about how you introduce the approach to customers who aren’t familiar with agile.
Put yourself in the customer’s position. You have just bought an expensive piece of software, you have a team of consultants coming in to understand your specific needs for the software and configure the solution accordingly. You will have some idea about how that’s likely to work, because it won’t be the first piece of software that you have ever implemented. If the vendor now tries to convince you that there is a better way based on lots of mini-deliverables, you might well need some convincing--especially if the expectation is that the first several deliverables won’t be quite what you need.
Selling the benefits
As the project manager, your first task is to help the customer understand why agile is a suitable approach for them. There’s no point in starting by explaining the mechanics--if they don’t buy into the concepts, then you are wasting your time. In my example, the client is …
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"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." - Orson Welles, The Third Man |