Agile Travels
I’ve worked at this compensation consulting company for the past two years. Our projects are typically assessments – we do some pre-assessment planning and send documentation to the client to fill out, then travel to the client site and stay there for two or three days while we interview everyone from the CEO to the Chief Bottle Washer, come back home, spend another two weeks analyzing and documenting our findings and recommendations, and return to the client site to present a summary of our findings and recommendations. Given the short duration of our assessments, I thought this would be a prime time to test out using Agile for project delivery. I’ve heard some good things about Agile for a little while from some former and current colleagues (as well as clients if you can believe it!), and a lot of it makes sense – even from a common sense standpoint. For much of my current career, I’ve been delivering projects using the waterfall methodology. So based on what I’ve learned about Agile from others as well as what I read, we’ll see how this goes. And I’m bound to make mistakes, but the good thing about Agile is that it allows mistakes to be made more frequently but each mistake has a much lower impact on the entire project (because it EXPECTS you to have to make course corrections and to expect the unexpected!)