I’m on the panel for a discussion tonight hosted by BeyondRecruitment along with Mike Lowery from the ACC and Dave Withington from MSD.

The key topics up for discussion:

• How do you know an Agile project is still in control?
• What will kill an Agile project?
• Can Agile deliver us more value for money than traditional methodologies?

The flyer poses a toughy:

Given the current economic climate where ongoing cost cutting is now the rule rather than the exception, is Agile the key to achieving value for money in project delivery? Or have we been burnt by Agile evangelists and issues around project governance?

I’m actually leaning heavily towards “yes” on both counts. Yes, because Agile clearly enables you to deliver less scope overall which is focussed on the higher business value requirements, and yes, because governance groups are still very wary of anything without a fixed scope.

My gut feel is that these groups need to see lower budget agile projects deliver critical change faster than waterfall counterparts before they will have any sense of comfort around agile. Ultimately we need to see more delivery using uncompromised agile (despite it being a hard sell) because pseudo-agile projects ultimately impact the reputation of agile in your organisation and the ability of teams to deliver successfully.