Category: agile rfp

Finding a Partner to Trust - Using Competitive Sprints to Select an Agile Software Vendor

October 29, 2008 by Peter Stevens

Some people would like to believe that building complex software is like going to the grocery store: pick a candy bar off of the shelf, ask what it costs and decide to buy it. You get no risk and quick gratification. But building custom software is more like building a race car. A special one-off product to meet exactly the needs of its sponsor: win races.

As a customer, what are you really buying when you contract for software development? You may think you are getting a solution. But what you are really getting is an implementation team. And risk is always part of the bargain. So what you really want is a team you can trust to build your product and to minimize the risk of that choice.

In this article, I present a lightweight, lean approach to selecting a software development partner which should dramatically reduce the risk and cost to all parties.

Finding a Partner to Trust - Writing an Agile RFP to Outsource a SW Development Projects

October 22, 2008 by Peter Stevens

My customer wanted to find an external partner to develop their new software product and develop using Scrum. So we needed to evaluate the potential partners, but how? The classical approach is to define the application “exactly”, then ask some potential vendors if they can do it and how much it will cost (and then haggle over the price). This is not very Scrum like, but it represents a starting point which is well understood by customers and vendors alike. What is different about an Agile RFP?

Finding a Partner to Trust - Using Scrum to Create an Agile RFP

October 15, 2008 by Peter Stevens

I just finished helping a customer write an RFP (Request for Proposal) for a software development project. The customer has had some expensive experiences with waterfall style projects, and Scrum had been the key to getting those projects back on course. So it seemed logical to plan Scrum from the beginning. But how do you write an agile, Scrum-Compatible RFP? How do you select a company to implement an agile project? We started with Scrum.

Part 1 in the Agile RFP Series;

1. Using Scrum to Create an Agile RFP
2. Contents of the Agile RFP
3. Selecting an Agile Outsourcing Partner

Google was remarkably unhelpful with this problem. The top links all pointed to a paper and presentation from 2003 about combining Use Cases and User Stories in the RFP process. A request to the ScrumDevelopment Group produced no responses. So we were on our own.