Selling Agile -- A Risk Mgt Sell

I always get asked questions about selling agile projects to clients, and in particular how do we deal with large programs (with all their artificial due dates, and door-stops of func spec), vendor mgt negotiations/objections, and the old CFO question: "how much will it cost for the final product".

The problem in actually dealing with these folks is that they fundamentally don't recognise their own issues/problems/weaknesses, and don't understand the alternatives. Specific issues include:

• Their own time to delivery is very long
• They only have one shot at getting it right
• The users WILL change their minds, and/or there WILL be ambiguities in specs
• The period for ROI analysis is too long as the sheer number of resources, dependencies, risks, issues, etc on the investment side becomes complex to measure, against a highly uncertain measurement of results and thus return.
• They currently don't have a good way of measuring product quality.

Throw into this boiling pot, their desire to fixed price the project and/or require payment on deliverables, and already we get into a never-ending cycle of negotiation. For some other details check out this guy's blog post.

So, let's try to put some simple meaningful and business-savvy ideas forward to the person on the other side of the table:

• What if the user provides the direction in what we build in any given 'timeboxed' period (oh let's say, 30 days?) , and we agree to a set of deliverables in that period?
• And, what if we get paid for the work we did on each 30-day period, providing we did what we said we would?
• And, what if this results in a series of fixed cost schedules ?
• And, what if everytime we deliver what we say, it works in production ?

Then,

• Wouldn't that ensure the users actually gets what they want ?
• Wouldn't that mean that the worst downside risk, is what happens in any 30-day period, resulting in the ability to calculate a series and aggregate ROI numbers ?
• Wouldn't that mean that the product quality is controlled throughout the project ?
• Wouldn't that give vendor mgt and a CFO what they want in terms of risk mgt, controlled costs ?