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Arin Sime speaking at Agile 2009

I was very excited to learn earlier this week that I had a session proposal for Agile 2009 accepted.  In Chicago on Thursday Aug 27, at 4pm, I’ll be discussing How to sell a traditional client on an agile project plan. Here’s how I described the session:

You’re negotiating a project with a client or internal customer, but they balk when you don’t present a fixed budget and a predefined list of requirements. How do you convince them that the benefits of an Agile team outweigh a top heavy and fragile requirements document? Based on Agile experience with government and commercial clients, we will discuss ways to make your customer feel comfortable with process changes that don’t always result in the same set of documents they are used to.

  • Process/Mechanics
  • Learning outcomes
  • Insight into different types of clients, and what they often expect
  • Strategies for finding a middle ground between what they are used to, and the freedom you need to implement Agile
  • Ideas for dealing with customer expectations throughout the project
  • Real world examples of how to deal with clients who require processes that are not Agile
  • Examples of how to structure a proposal to incorporate Agile methodology

One of the reviewers posted a comment about my session which read “This session addresses a very common question I come up against, and feel we should be offering the answers to.”

I was glad to see that comment, because I agree completely and thats why I proposed the session. While I wont claim that we here at OSC have all the answers, I do think weve developed a lot of experience in the area due to the wide range of clients that we work with. Some are very agile, some … not so much. Many are somewhere inbetween.

OpenSource Connections has methods based on our experiences, but I would love to hear feedback from others too. Are there any particular Agile war-stories that you have about convincing a traditional client to implement agile practices?