By Martin Sexton, Senior Business Analyst at Finworks
Having been brought up with Prince II and the management of projects from a top-down approach, it has been a refreshing experience working within an organisation that has adopted Agile wholeheartedly. It’s worth pointing out that Prince II and Agile are not mutually exclusive, as Agile focusses on product delivery and fits nicely with the Managing Product Delivery process within Prince II, which allows for the inclusion of other delivery frameworks.
The focus of Prince II is on outputs, following a plan, good documentation and adhering to management processes, whilst Agile the focus is on customer collaboration, responding to change, sufficient documentation and individuals and interaction.
In addition, to delivering projects, Agile lends itself to Business As Usual (BAU) engagement. To summarise Prince II, it has been designed to support projects and as such has the following characteristic:
- Temporary
- Difficult
- Team created for the term of the project
- A level of uncertainty
Agile frameworks can support project developments as well as BAU characteristics, that include:
- Pre-existing
- Ongoing
- Stable team
- A level of uncertainty
Given that the customer’s understanding of what they want may change as they receive deliveries of the product(s).
A key aspect of any management approach is to ensure that the Customer/Supplier Agreement is tailored around trust and collaboration. Where possible frequent and often release schedule is ideal, to ensure a mutual understanding of what’s achievable within appropriate timeboxes.
There are several Agile methods and approaches we have adopted internally and externally to align with our customers methods. These include Scrum, Kanban and Lean Startup, especially when examining new opportunities for customers.
Large European Financial Institution Case Study
Having been responsible for maintaining BAU services for a major data warehouse initiative, we undertook a one-year ETL project to replace an expensive Third-party ETL tool with an open source inhouse equivalent. This was project subsequently reduced to nine months.
Working in an Agile environment we were able to deliver the solution within the drop-dead timeframe, ensuring no penalties for our customer for having to request an extension of the Third-party ETL tool agreement to support any late delivery.
This engagement resulted in substantial annual cost savings to the institution and once completed it is now support as part of our BAU team.
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