The Agile Executive

I conducted 10 sessions this year on the topic Socializing Agile with Your Executives. The various Agile champions that attended these sessions identified two major obstacles to successful vetting of the topic:

1. Lack of hard quantitative data.
2. The “It won’t work here” syndrome.

This post is about the first of the two – lack of hard quantitative data. A follow-on post will deal with the second obstacle.

Michael Mah‘s landmark study How Agile Projects Measure Up, and What This Means to You has been my recommendation for the Agile champion who needs to elevate his/her Agile pitch from qualitative to quantitative. This excellent study in nicely supplemented now by The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing ROI with Just-in-Time Processes and Documentation by Rico, Sayani and Sone. It is an excellent fit for the champion promoting Agile for the following reasons:

1. The book captures, analyzes and synthesizes the results of hundreds of systemic research studies.
2. It provides data on the various Agile methods without favoring one over another. Furthermore, the authors are quite explicit in stating that it not the method itself but the fit of a method to a company/culture/environment that counts.
3. It places equal weight on costs and benefits of Agile, thereby giving the reader a good grasp on trade-offs. This grasp can be enhanced through free downloads of cost and benefit spreadsheets from the corresponding Download Resource Center.
4. A very impressive aspect of this new book is the broad spectrum of the metrics it provides. Just about any business metric your CIO/CFO/CXO might use as the basis for his/her decision-making process, including Real Options Analysis (ROA), is provided. Moreover, the book encourages the use of multiple metrics, clearly indicating the pro and cons of individual metrics. For example:

The business value of Agile methods may be as much as 90% higher than NPV using ROA under extreme market conditions, including high inflation, risk change, and amount of time.

Readers of this blog are familiar with my quip “Don’t take you boss to lunch; take him/her to the daily stand-up meeting.” I would suggest you give The Business Value of Agile Software Methods to your boss at the end of his/her first stand-up meeting. This recommendation is nicely seconded by the following excerpt from Sanjiv Augustine‘s review of the book:

… those looking to build a bullet proof case for agile methods based on solid data and comprehensive research and analysis will find this an invaluable work.

Disclosure: Colleague David F. Rico has kindly sent me a free copy of The Business Value of Agile Software Methods.