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copied!<p>The last thing you want on an agile project is fixed scope (generally what is contained in a contract on a traditional waterfall project). What you do want is an agreement to a fixed schedule with a fixed size team working against a prioritized product backlog.</p> <p>If you force your business partner to define a fixed scope during initiate, they will stuff all they can think of in the contract. Not because it has value, but because it will be hard to make changes later and they might need it.</p> <p>One can provide a high level estimate for a set of features requested by the business partner. However, the team, composed of IT and a product owner accepts that scope and priority will and can easily change during the implementation of the features. By keeping focus on working on the most important features first the team becomes value driven not plan driven. If anything does fall off the list it is of lesser value and has been displaced by something the team learned to be more important.</p> <p>A contract for fixed scope locks the team into making scope decision when they know the least about the features. Focusing on priority and allowing priority and scope to flex between iterations ensure what is delivered has value.</p> <p>Instead of signing a contract for fixed scope with the business, attend an agile boot camp with your business partner. The class should outline the agile process and the role of the product owner. If the business accepts the agile approach you ready to begin development. Build you product backlog, prioritize it, provide a high level estimate, build a release and iteration plan and start delivering value.</p> <p><strong>The way we executed the relationship</strong> is to first send the business partner to agile boot camp. Then we trained the business partner to be a product owner. Then we built the backlog, provided a high level estimate and fixed the size of the team and time boxed the development. Within two weeks the first working software was demoed. From that point on the business partner was in and understood the value of making change as they learned more. Any discussion of a fixed scope contract was soon forgotten.</p>

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