Ship Earlier Than You Expect With Agile Scheduling

Transcript

When I talk to business leaders about agile, inevitably the topic of agile scheduling will come up. I usually blow their minds when I tell them that we can predict how long it’s going to take, plus or minus about 10%. They’re used to taking the software estimate from their development team and tripling it because that’s what their experience has told them to expect. The way we do this is by using an agile practice of always driving the product to a potentially shippable state every two weeks, meaning that everything has been designed, coded, tested, any bugs have been fixed, and it is, in fact, ready to put into customer’s hands every two weeks.

We build a very small part of the product, make sure it works, and then we show it to business stakeholders, which gives the company and the business a whole lot of flexibility, because they can look at what the development team has produced and say, “You know what? I thought we were going to do a lot more before shipping the product, but this looks awesome. I showed it to some customers, they’re really excited about it. Let’s take this and ship it now.” And so, in fact, far from having projects overrun by months or even years, we’ve had clients accelerate their release schedule and ship a product early. When is the last time you heard of someone shipping early in software development? But we can do it all the time with agile scheduling. If you want to learn more about how we can help you, please contact us for a free consultation.