Program

Agencies and Agile – Pain and Opportunity

Agile approaches like the Scrum framework have become adopted by many web agencies.There are, however, circumstances for “project companies” compared to “productcompanies” that make a lasting success with Agile more difficult. For example in many casesthe Scrum Product Owner comes from the agency, thus being a proxy PO. Usually he haslimited power of decision and often limited access to end users. That makes progress andfeedback cycles much less rapid and smooth. Nevertheless a proxy PO is usually moreunder pressure by stakeholders to produce reliable forecasts concerning the “magicaltriangle” of scope, time, and cost. Also often agencies cannot afford a full time ScrumMaster– let alone one ScrumMaster per team – weakening his position and effectiveness.Furthermore the revenue model and financial degree of freedom for teams/companies arevery different depending on whether they are likely to scale in terms of profit. That is usuallythe case for product company. Project companies on the other hand cannot scale profits,they have to deal with time boxed capacity utilization (= project) and in addition often areforced to work under fixed price contracts. Last but not least it is rare for web agencies to beable to afford a one­team­one­project­process that a couple of agile frameworks favor.Those facts makes it more challenging to manage capacities and react to urgent issues. Allin all the talk will have a look at these and other obstacles and point out possible solutions,both from a theoretical viewpoint and also speaking from year long experience from ouragency.