An Insider's View on Agile

This is from someone inside our client base who has also tried to sell & manage Agile projects....

The issue with selling (and managing) Agile projects is maintaining the balance between rapid delivery and controls. Traditional projects that businesses are used to following expect a roadmap, milestone dates, dependency dates and anticipated ends with expected functionality. With Agile methodologies, requirements are developed as you go and the end state is less predictable. Keys to success include tightly managing expectations and setting guidelines for each iteration. Selling these types of programs are difficult because they don't fit within the traditional framework - if you can walk through a project lifecycle and build the predictability by setting tight guidelines for estimations, time spent on an iteration, level of detail spent on each component at any given time, building a working end-to-end system albeit "rough" functionality in the first few iterations I think you can demonstrate the benefits of the methodology and mitigate the risks.

Also, large companies and large programs will worry about the forecasting of key dependencies on integration points with other systems. You will need to accout for that as well.

In the end you will create a hybrid traditional/Agile methodology to enable you to gain the speed and agility of rapid iterations with the controls, planning and forethough of integration.