Big Delivery in Small Packages Through Agile

  Agile   PM Network  

One lunch with a casual acquaintance three years ago changed the way Jason Fair, PMP, thought about enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects.

“We were just networking. I said, ‘What do you do?’ She said, ‘I’m an agile coach.’ I didn’t know what that was,” recalls Mr. Fair, CEO of Genesis Consulting, a Glen Allen, Virginia, USA-based consultancy specializ- ing in ERP solutions. “She said, ‘I help my customers on their software projects. I make them more productive, help them create better software so customers have higher customer satisfaction, improve the quality of their product and increase the velocity at which their teams work.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute—I want all that.’”

As an ERP expert, not a software developer, Mr. Fair wondered: Could he apply agile techniques and best practices on his projects to realize the same benefits?

Three years later, he insists the answer is yes. “On one of my recent projects, we introduced agile to an ERP project team of 16 people. They had a portfolio of about 10 projects waiting to get done, but based on their budget and constraints, they were only able to get two of those done in that fiscal year,” he says. “I came in, introduced agile, and we ended up increasing the productivity of their team by 250 …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.