Collaborative Agile Contracts
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 10:15:49 AM (Romance Standard Time, UTC+01:00)Recently peterstev reported on, 10 Contracts for your next Agile Software Project.
In BestBrains we now have experience from two commercial projects using a new kind of agile contract.
We want to create contracts where risk is shared fairly between customer and supplier and where likewise benefit is shared fairly. Based on our experiences we have arrived at a contract model that has proven to achieve this result. We call this the collaborative agile contract.
The main mechanism of the contract is to delay some of the payment until a certain criteria has been reached. We do not use a date as this criteria which otherwise seems to be common. Rather we want a criteria that tells when we have a situation where the customer is getting value from the software. There is generally a mutual interest of arriving at this situation as quickly as possible. Effectiveness and creativity from the supplier will be rewarded. And the customer will be careful when deciding what features are needed in order to reach that goal.
The contract defines the following elements:
- Scope described loosely in a few paragraphs, a kind of vision statement
- An hourly price, that is 10-50% below what is normal for pure time-and-material
- A set of milestones, which will lead to payment of a fixed amount. The simple criteria that tells that a given milestone has been reached, is whether the software is deployed in production.
- A development process following agile practices
- A suggested time frame for the overall project and for each milestone
We are going to report on our experiences at Agile 2009, but don't hestitate to comment on this blog entry or contact Lars Thorup to learn more about agile contracting.
agile kontrakter
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