Tagged with: agile • exigen services • flex-agility • governance • offshore • outsourcing • Video
Ever heard of a fixed price agile method for outsourcing? Sounds like utopia, but with a closer look it makes sense. It’s about agility, a proper governance model, and, as always, communication, communication and communication.
In this episode of “The Project Shrink” I have the pleasure of talking to Alec Miloslavsky, CEO of Exigen Services. His company developed Flex-agility: an outsourced, fixed price, Agile-based application development offering.
We discuss
- flex-agility,
- how do you balance scope changes and a fixed budget, and
- how to handle communication between customer and outsourcing partner with changes occurring and the price fixed.
You can view the video below… or follow this link to YouTube.com.
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Tell me about todays market of Software Development
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Thanks for giving this a cool term. This is what we do at Dynamical Software. We use http://www.code-roller.com to enable this approach. You work with the prospective client to iterate on the requirements. You set your fixed price. All requirements that can be done for that price go in the next release, the rest of the requirements go in a future release to be bid on later. There's some back and forth with requirement swapping between the two releases. Overall, it works pretty well with minimal push back by the client.
While fixed price sounds great, I have never seen a project that perfectly captures the requirements up front. Therefore, while you have fixed price, for any change in scope you will have a change request resulting in an additional cost. So really, chasing fixed price is chasing unicorns for real world projects.
Listening I was waiting to hear how fixed price could work in the environment described. Still not sure how easy it would be to duplicate.
Great points from Alec on how he supported successful work with virtual teams:
* On site presence at client
* Daily communication – no isolation allowed
* Varied means of communication including Skype
* Frequent communication
Have not used Skype on a virtual team – but can see the benefits. Time to find a higher quality webcam!
Alec
P.S. As Glenn wrote, flexagility is a cool term.
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