Agile Contracts
Over the last several years I have been actively engaged in contract creation and negotiation between my company and our clients for professional services and project work. My responsibilities have included reviewing and creating contractual documentation defining the scope, deliverables, timeline, and approach. The artifact used to for this contract negotiation is a standard Statement of Work (SOW) commonly used in various industries. The premise of a SOW is to detail the exact work that will be done for a given engagement.
Additionally, I have been one of the principle executors of Agile methodologies for software delivery within our company. We have been successfully engaging with various clients for the last fours years managing our development process with a SCRUM like development methodology. The adroit reader will immediately recognize the incompatibility of this Agile process with our contractual process mentioned above. I have been struggling over the last several years to adapt our SOW to support Agile processes. In short I feel that my efforts have fallen short and possibly failed.
In an effort to amend our contractual approaches I have had the opportunity to study various contract models. I have also discovered several resources that have proved valuable to understanding potential contractual approaches. I hope you find these resources useful as well.
Lean Software Development Excerpt
Alistair Cockburn – Agile Contracts
And of course some interesting tidbits (conceptually) from Martin Fowler