Agile Billing...
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- colossalhead
As we are moving into larger projects - estimating becomes more fuzzy and defining all the requirements up front is often unrealistic - so we are looking at other options for managing cash flow during development.
So I am wondering if anyone in the community is using agile billing for development projects (basically the client buys a sprint (or more) at a time - so 2 weeks or 4 weeks, etc. see http://www.smashingmagazine.com/… for an example), and if so how is it working out?
Any advice or issues you had in implementing such a strategy? I would suspect that some client education would be necessary - and I am thinking about different ways to sell the benefits of the strategy to both parties.
- spot130
Agile is great for development but it's a hard sell when you're telling the client we're not really sure how far we'll get but you'll get something at the end of the sprint cycle. As a client, you want to know what the project is going to cost before you start, with the exception of very large clients with start up values, I think you will still need to quote for the job in most cases but it's worth a shot if you know the client.
- I agree this is a key challenge, and ideally you would want to provide an estimate of the total number of sprints.colossalhead
- doesnotexist0
only works with large clients. sounds like it's fairly similar to using a retainer system.
- Mattjanz3n0
What did you end up doing colossalhead? We're estimating jobs with the PERT system right now and I know we're going to miss things and be banging our heads against the wall in 3 months. For smaller projects we've done lots of it is great, but not large.
- studderine0
There is an consultancy that helps agencies scope projects using some of the tenets of agile software development.