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CTRM IMPLEMENTATION


frequently willing to bid under their cost to get the contract. The reason – the ‘changes’ clause that results in ‘equitable adjustments’. Invariably, the Pentagon will request design changes. Once the contract is awarded, the competition is over. The vendor is now a monopoly provider who can charge virtually anything for the changes. The vendor bids under cost to acquire this license to steal. I’m now in the CTRM business and very little has


changed. In my opinion, every implementation I have ever been involved with would have benefitted from an Agile approach. But the vendors did not offer such an option because it would shut down lucrative change requests. Waterfall is perfect for the purveyor of change requests. All the design is done up front before either side can fully understand the true requirements. The contracts are written in such a way that the customer wears all the risk once they have approved the design. Inevitable subsequent changes trigger change requests. Ka-ching! Mads Bayer, an Executive Advisor at Danske,


reports implementing a banking solution using Waterfall. Looking back on it, he thinks “there was a lot of readjusting after the delivery, which might have been stopped earlier with higher user involvement in the process, by using Agile.” There are a number of open questions about


Agile for CTRM projects. Perhaps first among them is whether Agile can scale. Small, high performance teams have a way of making any methodology look pretty good. Agile starts with an assumption of competence. As evidenced by a thick policy manual, bureaucracy starts with the opposite assumption. Agile requires transparency, which means accountability, the mortal enemy of bureaucracy. So how is Agile to work in big companies with ordinary employees? Is Agile elitist? Without statistics, we’re reliant on anecdotes.


Colin Johnson, a consultant at BJSS, believes Agile does scale. “I have seen DSDM (one of many methodologies under the Agile flag) work in large and bureaucratic organizations where there is a solid baseline of trust and the methodology has been fully integrated into the company’s governance structures.” Stephen Nimmo, an ETRM solution architect


with SunGard Global Services in Houston, reports that he has been delivering project using Agile methodologies for almost 5 years now and he used iterative methods for a few years before that. “My experience has been positive overall.


I’ve seen scrum managed teams deliver huge projects in very short time frames, and I’ve seen clients transform the way they manage software development expectations. I have also seen cases where teams were reluctant to do the introspective work required to improve estimation skills and


Analysis Design Implementation Testing


create well-balanced team membership, who end up doing iterative development with little improvement on delivery, in terms of overall throughput as well as code quality. Ultimately, any project management or delivery methodology has benefits and weaknesses. “Projects can still fail with Agile. In that case, the only advantage you will enjoy is that you’ll fail must faster.”


Agile ... “best suited to the build, test, tweak, deploy cycle for specific functionality ...”


Matt Cockayne, a director with leading industry


vendor OpenLink, sees Agile as “best suited to the build, test, tweak, deploy cycle for specific functionality. It falls down when clients have tried to use it for the full project. For the big greenfield or replacement projects, it is vital to get the design agreed and locked down and then managed by a clear change control process.” There is also an argument for a ‘third way’


or ‘Goldilocks’ solution that blends Agile and Waterfall. Seamus Maher, a Director at Sirius with 12 years of ETRM experience, sees benefit in the innovative nature of Agile when constrained by the much needed structure and discipline of Waterfall. One of the risks of a fad is that low information


players can take on the mantle of Agile without any genuine understanding of it. One ‘Agile Champion’ explained it this way; “Agile is great because you don’t need requirements. You just do the work and test it as you go.” This project eventually reverted to a Waterfall approach. Agile methods break tasks into small blocks that


can be achieved within an iteration. Each iteration includes planning, requirements analysis, design, coding , unit testing and acceptance testing.


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