Consulting projects are almost always a hybrid methodology.
“W-agile” 🤢 Ew. I don’t like that term.
But it _IS_ a hybrid waterfall+agile.
The exception is if the project is a bigger, longer, more complex engagement – a multi-year transformation programme, for example.
Small and medium term projects with a more defined ‘Start State’ and ‘End State’ will usually require the hybrid approach.
Client organisations will begin the engagement with (at least) a rough idea of what they want 📃, how long they want to run it 📆, and how much they want to spend. 💲💲
In other words – there are some constraints on the iron triangle of project management already.
Unless the client is fully able to embrace the idea of ‘agile’, especially if they aren’t quite sure of their requirements and want to experiment along the way (which by the way – costs money as well as accrues technical debt), then a #Salesforce consulting engagement needs to be a hybrid approach.
This way – we can mutually monitor the costs and risks while delivering something reasonably concrete at the end.
I know of a client who loved the idea of ‘agile’ (without truly understanding the concepts), who kept changing directions against partner advice, who at the end of a very long and expensive ‘experiment’, ended up with a sub-par implementation, bloated with debt. 😣
True story.
I came from the #Microsoft partner ecosystem where we ran waterfall projects (I didn’t have problems as I understood the need to set and manage client expectations closely).
The ‘agile’ one in the world of #Salesforce was new to me, and I kept an open mind to try and learn and to manage them properly. I got myself Agile-DSDM certified as well, but the realities of consulting projects did not meet my expectations.
And so – unless someone can convince me why TRUE Agile would work in a consulting environment (with small-medium sized projects), where you
– deploy to production at the end of every sprint, and
– co-locate with the sprint team
– robustly test during each sprint (including functional, regression, and integration testing)
This is a hill I will die on. ⛰
If you want to learn more, my next Discovery Consulting Masterclass 8th May. Deets in the comments 👇🏻
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See you there?
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