 Mä oon tullut sen, ja tämä on jo olemme tullut, joten tämä oli 4-5 vuotta tai sellaista. Seuraavaksi, kun minulla ei ole mitään enemmän kuin tämä ja olemme muutamaa kertaa, mutta tänään minä haluan tietää, kuten meillä on, koska tämä on täysin ympäristö. Mä oon tullut tullut muutamaa kertaa, kuten meillä on täysin. Tällä pari kertaa kokemuksista kysymyksiä. mene Rainerun ei ole niin paljon tykkäyta. Se olisi meneestillä. Hyvää, miten meneet ja ownedan järväävät maailman Stars. Voi? Menees. Meneemme in hustleon objecti. Oikea. Toi nähdään, luulen. Meneemon voit tulla, että teä on yli pohjalla. Meneemme järvää meneesi päässä, mutta sielpäätössä. Meneeseen. Meneeseen. Mitä voidaan sanoa, että kaikki, mitä sinulla on tehdä, on tullut järjestelmällä, jossa on tullut järjestelmällä. Okei, kai hyvää asia. Minulla on the same talk in Drupalcon Amsterdam. Ja basically the room looked pretty similar in there as well. So I'm expecting quite a few questions. Usually from Wenderside there's a lot of different questions, unlike, you know, how's this and that working. So I'm doing the questions a bit differently from most sessions. We are going to be using Twitter for this, and I have my colleague Steve here who's going to moderate them for us. So I'm going to actually take these questions in the middle of the session as well. So we're just using hashtag selling agile. So this will help us to pick the most interesting questions that are specific for these topics and so on and so on. I have to jump out of my presentation for one second. I'll be right back with you. Just that I'm missing your questions and stuff here. Oh fine. I'll just manage without them. So the story today is really in three different parts. First of all, I'm going to talk a bit about everybody really loves agile and it's great. I'm going to talk about why it is so difficult to sell. What's the deal behind it? After watch, I'm going to talk about like most specific details on how to sell agile. And I have real stories like how to do it, a number of different examples on how to actually go about them and sell it. And I'm going to wrap it up by talking a bit about what if the customer still comes back and tells you like no, no, but I need to have fixed everything. So I do have three different approaches here. It's not only me talking today. I've been working and selling agile for more than 10 years. But I've been also being on the other side of the table. I've been also buying projects back in the day. And I've been talking to a number of different people about the same challenges. So this time I didn't bring anyone live here for interviews, but I did record a number of different videos. So for example, this guy here, he's a professional web buyer. So the only thing he does for a customer, he goes to a customer, helps them to find a vendor, helps them to go through an RFP process and so on and so on. So one of the question I asked from him is like how should vendors actually sell agile because this is all he does, day in and day out. So this interview was done in our office in Helsinki. So ignore the office doc that jumps into the video every now and then. We have quite a few office docs and this stuff happens when you try recording stuff. So this is really the core of what I'm going to talk about today as well. It's really like you don't want to sell agile, you want to sell the actual benefits of agile. This is where we'll be getting it. So I do attend quite a few agile conferences every year. And I talk about the same topics with different people in agile conferences as well. And usually when I ask them like do you have any problems in selling agile, they say like no, not really because everybody wants agile these days. We used to have problems with this but that's no longer the case. This is not exactly true in the triple universe unfortunately, but everybody is still kind of wants agile. So let me start by assuring you that agile is really simple but it's not easy. Like we did the agile training yesterday in here for a classroom full of people. You can actually teach something like Scrum in a day. The basic principles you can even learn in half an hour hour. It is really, really simple. But it's quite difficult to actually switch to agile because it's a change of a mindset. It's not so much about what you actually do. It's more about how do you approach on your projects and how does your organization think. So that's why it's definitely not easy. So the starting point of course is like everybody loves agile on its own. But if you ask them like well what do you mean by agile? What it is? It's very, very misunderstood on what agile is actually all about. It's a bit easier to explain what it's not about. So agile is definitely not about implementation. It doesn't have anything to do with implementing software on its own. You can use it for that, yes. But it's not really all about that. It's not about doing sprints or stand-ups or having burned down charts or any of that. It's not really that. It's not even pure time and materials always. It's like you can do agile with the fixed budget. That's fine. That's perfectly okay. You just can't do fixed everything if you want to do agile. And also agile is not going to be magic. It's not going to magically fix all of your problems. It's just going to make them more visible. It's going to give you some tools on how to fix those problems, but just going agile, that's not going to fix your problems on its own. So let me go a bit deeper on this. So I take it quite a few of you. Who hasn't seen this? Nobody dares to raise their hand. So this is the agile manifesto. This is from 2001. A bunch of people getting together on putting down some values on how to do proper software development, because a lot of software projects tend to fail. I went to university and studied computer sciences back in the 90s, and I can remember we were taught something like 80-90% of software projects fail. I thought, okay, thank you. Very nice studying here and learning that everything that I'm going to do is very likely to fail. And this used to be the case, and it still is. You can always read from papers on all of these massive IT projects that go wrong, but there are ways of making that risk smaller. It's not going to guarantee success, but there are ways of doing that. That's what this is all about. It's all about let's focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools and so on. I'm not going to go into all of the details here. These are the core principles behind agile, though. And they sound great, don't they? All of it makes sense. It's perfectly sensible to respond to change over following a plan. But there's always the but. And a brilliant individual created this. This is a manifesto for half agile software development. And this is what we see. And this is what most companies call agile, unfortunately. So this is like what it says down there. Items on the left sound nice in theory. But us being an enterprise company, we can't let go on the things on the right. So it's going to be like individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And we have mandatory processes and tools on controlling those individuals, blah, blah, blah. And this is what happens. So this is where you go wrong. Because if you really want to take a leap and go agile, it's also all about letting go of some of these things. If you just try to get like best of waterfall and agile and do everything, you're not going to get benefits from either one of these. So this is what I call fake agile, usually. Or fragile, in some cases as well. But it's completely faking. It's just having your waterfall process and putting sprints on top of it. It's not going to do. It's not going to make the process agile. You may get some benefit from the sprints, but you're not actually getting the core benefits of the agile process. So why this happens? My analysis on this looks like this more or less. For agile, there's two primary things. One of them is trust. One of them is communication. So obviously up and right is more of both in this diagram. So if you have a lot of trust and you have perfect communication, what do you have? You have an in-house team. The trust is implicit because everybody works for the same company. Everybody is in the same room, so you have very rich communications. What's the other like extreme? That would be like external vendor, a new one and off-short one, where you mostly communicate by emails, by people having interesting accents and different cultures. All in all, the communication may not be all that great. In between, of course, you have vendor that is co-located, where communication works, but the trust is implicitly not there. You have to build the trust. Of course, you can have a distributed in-house team, where you have the communication problems, but the trust is there. So what it looks like, the traditional agile is really built for the in-house teams. Scrum, for example, is meant for product development done by in-house teams. Everybody is sitting in the same room. That's what it's for. It can be used for everything else as well. But if you have a vendor working in-house, co-located vendor, then I have problems with these lovely people at procurement departments and legal departments. My two favorite departments in any enterprise company, always so nice to work with and flexible. So that's what you'll have. And that's what's causing you some problems. If you have a distributed team, regardless of where they are, you have communication and knowledge management problems with agile. You don't have the documentation and you don't have the comps in place. You end up having some problems with that. And if you start agile with having an offshoring vendor, that's going to be very challenging. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I'm just going to say you are definitely picking the most challenging way of starting your agile journey. And I know because we have 170 people doing Drupool all over Europe, so we have a fair share of distributed teams. Not off short, everybody can fly and meet the customer within one or two hours, the flights are cheap and short, but still we do a fair bit of distributed. So we've seen this a lot. So of course our way of fixing this is making airlines like us a lot by flying on site and spending time with the customer. But the trust issue is much more difficult to solve. So if there's no trust, there's not going to be any proper agile because in place of trust you start putting in contracts and the contracts start defining everything. And yeah, I'll get back to that in some of my examples. So do we have any questions so far? Yeah, we have a couple of questions in or a couple of points. Let's take one from now. Grabtindi has tweeted and says, do you find there is a minimum scale for a successful agile project and does the approach change depending on scale? For example, working in thematic sprints versus deployable horizontal slices? That's an excellent question, yes. You can use agile for all sizes, but you can't use, for example, scrum for all sizes. In the end, if you look at scrum, a sprint is a waterfall. That's what it is. And if you do only one sprint, it's kind of fake to call it agile. It's like, come on, this is scrum. It's like, no, no, it's a waterfall project really. But you can use lean methods. You can use Kanban. You can use others like that for smaller projects. When you scale up, there's no definite upper limit for using something like scrum. But that said, if a project is big enough, you want to start splitting it into multiple teams. And then you have all the difficulties that you get with managing multiple teams, but that's a bit of scope for today. And that's okay for now. But if you want more questions, tweet hash-selling agile. Thank you, Steve. All right. So moving on. Moving on how to actually sell this stuff. I do this a lot. And I fail a lot in this. I succeed quite a bit as well. But so let's get back to do our story for a while. So what did we do with this vendor? Sorry, this customer. We sort of, we started working with them and said like, okay, you know, let's put a lot more support in place than you usually have. And let's think about for a while. You are saying you always fail with vendors. Let's think about an example from your normal daily life. All of us, I'm sure, have a friend who's less successful in relationships. I think everybody has one. So what do they often say? They say that all men or women are so horrible. I just can't make it work. All of them are so bad. So what's the one single thing that doesn't change in all of your relationships? Well, yeah, yourself. Look at the mirror. That's what I told the customer. Are all of your vendors always failing with all the other customers? No, they're still in business. So why do you think they are always failing with you? Well, that got them thinking. They were a bit more willing to get in some extra overheads and some extra support after that. So basically getting a customer to realize what the problem is all about is a good stuff. So let's have a look at the benefits then. These are four key benefits of agile. The red line being agile. The black line being waterfall or design first. Any other methodology where you do your design first and implementation later. So I just typically call them design first all of these methodologies. So of course in agile you have a bit more visibility because traditionally when you start you have perfect visibility. You think you know what you're doing because your plans are perfect and you have perfect visibility, right? So the goal where you don't know anything and something may or may not come out at the end. In agile, same thing happens, but all the time. So you sort of do plan, you implement, you deploy something. So visibility is much better. Adaptability. In agile we can change stuff all the time. So the project is much more adaptable to change during the environment or in the organization or what have you. Business value. In traditional we work the highest value items first. So we deliver the maximum value right away. In traditional we do everything in one big bang moales. We may have multiple releases, but we still we need to do everything before we can release. So the business value generation. If you stop the project in the middle it looks very different. Risk wise, risk is sort of a mirror image of the business value because when we start delivering value the risk goes down. Simple as that. So these are sort of the four key elements. But I'm going to go a bit deeper with some case examples. So I think, because more than half of the room is vendors I think you've seen most of this with your customers at some point. So first one is the famous fixed scope. Like yeah sure, of course all of the customers always say of course we can do agile, not a problem. That's fine. But you know, I need to have a fixed budget and fixed scope and fixed timeline and fixed everything. After that we can do agile. Yeah, not a problem. Well, let's have a look at this. Let's compare for a while. So first of all, where do we focus if we have a fixed scope where most customers think they are protecting their own back sides by having a fixed scope? In a fixed bit the vendor really focuses on checking all of the boxes. There are some requirements and these requirements need to be met. And if you meet them really quickly and cheaply you are making a massive profit. If you take a while with them, you are not really making any profit. So it really is all about checking the boxes with minimum effort with fixed bit. Agile on the other hand, it is diamond materials. So your incentive is to create as much value as you can for the customer with the time you spend. You focus on the results and you can also focus on the total cost of ownership instead of one of cost of a project. Scope, well, fixed bit is fixed. Changes are going to be expensive. There's change management in place and customer will pay for all of these changes. On the other hand on agile, of course, you know, it's built for being flexible and, you know, it's built for change. Do you have a question at this point? I was just going to wait a moment. Now you ask. Yes, Anthony Lindsay asks specifically in this area, how can you marry agile with a fixed price traditional request for a tender? So if the customer is demanding the fixed, how can you marry agile to that request, given it's in their best interests? Yes, you can do it actually quite easily. As long as the customer can be flexible on the scope, fixed price is perfectly fine. So what you can do is you can do very high level promises on we are going to deliver this and this business goal, we are going to meet with this project. You know, we are going to do what we can. The actual specific scope itself, that needs to be flexible. So what we do often to meet the requirements of legal and procurement is like the contract actually says like this is the initial backlog for the project. This is the scope. That makes legal people happy. They are all smiling at this point. And then it says, and the steering group of the project may change this at any point. And you know, it's going to keep on changing. And the steering group is like participants from the customer and vendor as long as they are greeting and do whatever with it. So basically you have all of this. Ideally you wouldn't even have it in a contract. But in real world when you work with enterprise level customers, you kind of have to put it in there. You just leave in a loophole to be able to change it. That's the easiest way I've figured out how to do it. That usually works. Because typically in my experience, if you have a customer who has an idea and knows what they are doing, the actual sales game is like you and customer against the procurement unfortunately. Because the procurement is just saying like no, no, we can't do this because we are trained to do it differently. It is unfortunate that I think procurement needs to change but that's not the topic for today. Was there something else? Okay, great. So the risk. In fixed bit risk is largely hidden. So what the customer is trying to do in a fixed bit, you are trying to move the risk to the vendor by having contracts and sanctions and what have you. And that's like you can try to do it but it's not very easy and often you can't even do it. In agile it's much more transparent and parties actually share the risk. It's transparent on how the risk is shared who has what part of the risk and so on. It's quite different. Let me do an example. Let's say I'm a customer who I need to transfer 20 bags of rice every day. I need to transfer them say like five kilometers or five miles doesn't make a lot of difference for this example. And I need to be able to transfer them say in an hour. So I define these requirements. I have all of these check boxes that you have to meet these and these and these requirements and I'll make up 10 more just to be on a safe side. And then I think okay I've covered all of the requirements. So now I'm going to send out an RFP and I'm just going to basically beat the cheapest because you know hey I'm completely safe. My requirements are going to be my safety net. This is what happens in IT projects all the time. So what do I get as a customer? What's the expectation? I'm going to get a lorry or something like that. That's my expectation. Well this is what comes up. It's the cheapest possible thing that does the trick. You're going to hate to use it. It's going to break down. Every other day you can't actually get the backs delivered because it breaks down and you have a lot of downtime. But it checks all the boxes. So you can't blame the vendor. So all of these traditional requirements you have in RFPs they are very very good at covering the backside of the vendor. Not great at covering the backside of the customer. So actually the traditional approach especially for IT projects it completely turns on its head. It's not good for the customer especially if you look at very large IT companies they are very good at playing this game as well. So the customer is never going to be happy and they are going to be very profitable in these projects. And in almost all cases the vendor has more competence in playing this game than the customer does. So. Also there's this. This is a real picture. It's from construction industry I think. So the big yacht there. It's called the chains order. And the small thing is original contract. And it's kind of funny because that's the way it is in real life. For IT companies the chains orders and traditional fixed everything contracts those are the most profitable part. So they are very good at change management because that's where they make their money. And this is when the projects are millions and millions. This is where it's headed. Not many customers understand it and they still try to protect themselves. So as a vendor it's up to you to try to explain to the customers like look you are not really protecting yourself and even if you try it becomes a game and it's a game that is very difficult to actually win for you. So in this case if we use agile we'll be creating more value we'll be managing the risk better and we can have a lower total cost of ownership because we can focus on that instead of focusing on just checking the boxes. That point. Good point to introduce question from Anand who says isn't fixed bid a better alternative to timer materials for some projects with uncertain scope therefore the vendors absorb the delivery risks. Well this comes down to like if it's an uncertain scope actually I'll table it for a minute I'll get back to this because I do have an example on the risk so I'll get back to this in a second. Right, so the second quite typical case is not having a product owner. Product owner is the person who's who's sort of the project manager on a customer side the business owner of the project. So let's say you have a customer who has just documentation and mockups and so on and they just throw them out basically and say you go do it, we've done our part so you know we're gonna go out on a holiday or whatever. In Europe they would go on a holiday in America they go and work on other projects of course but the same concept applies of course so we have our vacations so still you know we've seen this. So what we do in all the projects with Wunder is we create like one team where instead of just having the digital and project competence we have we combine that with the business competence of customer. So first of all when this team together works on these things they can come up with new ideas and they can improve on the original ideas quite a bit. So the end result is much better it's like having a in-house digital team for customer. So this is the first thing it's actually the end result is likely to be better. Then the planning when we do it just in time this is how it looks traditionally right? We plan and analyze and design and you know then we let the code monkeys lose at some point and you know they go and code it and test it and release. So we don't really save on any of these steps when we're doing agile it doesn't mean no planning we still do all the same steps we need to do a bit of initial design first but we do it in different phases so we do the design just in time. So if somebody tells you that you're going to be saving time on design when you do agile they don't know what they're talking about. It's actually quite the opposite you may end up spending a bit more time on design but you're not wasting time on doing design or stuff which may not end up being implemented at all. So let's see if there's a let's imagine for a while that there was a project where both budget runs out or time runs out this naturally never happens but if there were such a project and you run out of time in here what's going to happen with your traditional no product owner approach? You have something that is like mostly coded not tested at all and not ready for release and not released definitely with agile we did like the most valuable things first so the 50% of the project is actually already released or ready to release rest of it not done we can decide to continue and do it or if we really have to wrap the project up at this point that's what we do we still we got most of the valuable stuff out of the way so this is where we need the product owner we really need the product owner to make the decisions on what are the most important parts of this project so this actually leads into lowering the risk quite a bit it also leads into having better quality out of the project because we put on money where it makes the biggest difference instead of just trying to check all the boxes in the project and in the end it also leads often for saving money so third case delayed feedback in a project quite often if we try to do a big bang launch big bang launched which is like a typical way of launching design first project so basically you go in a dark room and then you come out with something and tadaa that's you know there we go we can launch it now typically we do testing quite late in the project typically we don't allow real users or beta users in the product quite early and this has some negative pretty negative effects first of these being let's think about the line in the middle being the optimal version of what we want to launch going up means spending too much time on details for example going down means not having enough version of a feature for example well in time if we only get the customer feedback or the end user feedback once we may actually deviate quite a bit from what's optimal before we know it whereas in agile where we launch often and launch early we get feedback all the time so we actually end up going back and forth it's still not going to be optimal all the time but we will not end up deviating during the entire project and only after building something that looks perfect launching it it doesn't work and this is very very important because with agile you can you can get stuff out early you can get feedback on it you can improve it, you can make sure it's really great for your users investment wise it also makes much more sense so if for a while if we assume we are playing a lottery with three balls and there's two ways of playing this the first way is the traditional way where a ticket costs three euros you pay it you win or you don't win that's the way it goes the second way of paying it is just buying one number for one euro and only after you know if it's a winning number investing to the next number and so on and if you do the math on this what the average investment is over a lifespan of a company or five or ten years or doing like thousand projects what do you think the average investment on a successful project is going to be it feels like this is sort of like in a real project doesn't make a big difference but if you want to go and google real options theory for example which is like a theory on how to do how to take like options in your real business development this is exactly what it enables when you do agile you can do smaller chunks of work when you know if they work or not then you can do additional investment so your investment decisions are going to be done with the latest responsible moment so this makes a massive difference for many organizations yet not enough organizations do this but again as vendors we can tell them like try to explain them why it's a good idea why should they invest just in time not everything up front so basically this leads us into having some real options on business development learning much faster and much more cost effective solutions did we have a question we do David Steven says if customers not happy with output with fixed bid and fixed scope how to get more budget when it won't guarantee better output sorry with flexible scope yes that makes more sense customers not happy with output with fixed bid and flexible scope how can you get more budget when it won't guarantee better output you won't what happens if you want to do proper agile which is mostly time and materials it doesn't have to be pure time and materials basically what you have to guarantee for the customer is an option of kicking you out so basically if you start working your contract says like if you are not happy for what we produce like the result for your spent money you get you can kick us out so it goes two ways the customer has to trust you but you have to trust the customer so in all of our contracts we say like you can fire us at any point if you are not happy what you get when we do project steering we make it really visible this is what you got this is the money you paid are you happy on it and in most projects at some point the customer is not going to be happy because we do stuff like integrations which is completely not visible and it's like well we don't really have anything to show when you just spend like 50,000 euros but that's sort of a temporary thing in technical projects but that's the situation so it's not a massive problem but if you continue doing it and not delivering value I think you deserve to get fired at that point fair enough customer trusted you and you were not delivering so out you go right so then the famous design first and now I'm talking a bit more like visual design first and such things because some companies say that our industry for example has so much regulation that everything has to be approved by legal before we build anything and then I talk to people like New York Stock Exchange which say they do exclusively agile and they design they don't design anything upfront I think their industry is pretty regulated that's just my guess so it's really only an excuse and being used to one way of working you don't have to do like visual designs or legal checks upfront you can actually build them into the agile process it just requires different way of thinking so let's see if we do design first oh and by the way we do the same thing when companies approach us and ask like as part of your proposal would you like to do like visual mockups no because this is what the project looks like and this is any project so down we have time and left hand side we have knowledge so in the beginning of the project any project the team has minimum knowledge of the project right with the common sense at the end of it we have maximum amount of knowledge so that's where the hindsight is a beautiful thing so when do we do all of the most important decision approach if we have all the requirements in an RFP we do them with the minimum knowledge right so we always tell to the customers for example when talking about like visuals that we don't want to do any of this with minimal knowledge we do have a agile design process in place for a very good reason and our own designers absolutely love it because they get to do design decisions with knowing much much more about the topic and the project and the end user so sort of when you show this to customers this is kind of like yeah okay it is what it is of course you can't make all the decisions at the end because the project is over at that point but you can postpone all of the key decisions to the latest responsible moment of course responsible is the key word here because if you just postpone all the decisions all the time it's worse than not deciding at all triple specific thing with triple features are cheap and details are expensive because in the end what do we do as triple shops we take a fully functional product and we spend the project in trying to break it we are pretty good at it typically we manage to break triple pretty well as well so when you spend most of your time in details in projects does it make any sense to fix all of those up front in worst case having a designer who has no idea how triple works designing something and then we just spend a lot of time trying to code it to look like somebody who has no idea how triple works triple has like existing user interfaces you know if we want to save a lot of money for the customer we have to consider these user interfaces a bit while doing design there's something called porretta principle that has nothing to do with technology it's from economics that states that about 80% of value you get for 20% of time this applies for any project for triple projects I would say 95% of the value you get for 5% of the time and rest of it you are tweaking on the details so when you are tweaking on let's say visual details you actually tweaking them on customer money it's not the designer's money and it's if there's an external design agency it's not certainly not the design agency's money because the design agency wants to win awards the customer wants to do business so basically it's up to the product owner to decide on how much tweaking we do with any details and this very much is true the last like 50% or more almost always is something that only sort of the in-house team even notices any difference so that's why for example we have our own prototype driven process where we can offer multiple options we know this is what we are trying to do and we could do this in like an hour with an existing triple feature it's not exactly what you asked for but it's kind of the same thing or we can spend a week doing exactly what you asked it's your money, you decide it's not our decision it's yours and quite often customers depict the cheaper way not always so we end up with improved product risk lower and also we generate with new ideas when we don't do designs upfront right so now we get back to the risk question um this is quite typical from customers to say like we expect you to carry the project risk because you know we have contracts in place that are going to transfer the risk for you and we have a lot of uncertainty in this project so we want you to carry the risk for us really? how realistic is that if you have a look at like can you even transfer that business risk if you are late to the market you lose a lot of revenues if there is damage to your brand because everything crashes because somebody skimped on the quality or a number of other things you can have some clauses saying you have to pay some money back for this but they are probably not going to compensate you for it or if they will that insurance is going to be really really expensive for you or in the worst case it is a vendor who has no idea on how to do their business and I don't know which one is more scary is it more scary to know that this like transfer of risk is not going to happen or knowing that you have a vendor who is incompetent so I don't think you can actually do it also the traditional way of doing procurement is sort of like win-lose it is based on procurement being a game and in a game you have winners and losers how often in real life do you see like win-lose relationships working for longer run they may work initially for you but on longer run the person who is losing in this relationship is looking to get out and if a customer is just looking for a vendor to lose in a relationship yeah the vendor may do it to get a reference to fix cash flow for a minute or whatever but the vendor is not going to be there for a longer run unless they can fix the relationship so instead of trying to win it would be much much better to try to look for a relationship which is like equal and actually you know works for both parties as well so that's sort of the big difference and we fortunately we see more and more companies these days like large companies looking to find like really healthy relationships where it's really transparent on like what do we get out of it transparent about our margins and everything and explain like what makes a difference for our margins how can you help us to do better business so we can also help you to do better business so transparency is the best policy one practical example on this pricing what you can do for example you can do target pricing for contract like look this is the price we are aiming for and then we have the maximum price for a contract if we manage to deliver under the target price we get a 20% bonus on what's remaining customer gets a really big discount but this discount is only happening because the customer product owner was smart on setting priorities and enabled us to do work quickly and not get hung up on all the details on the other hand if we go over the maximum budget we give say 40% discount on everything that is done over the maximum price something like 40% 50% is typically in our industry that's where we are no longer making any money so this is really bad for us to end up in this situation but it's not for free for the customer it needs to hurt both parties if this happens because there also has to be an incentive on getting out of this situation so if you want to have a look at like how to build this sort of situations just google for like agile contract models there are quite a few good models on how to do fair contracts that work well for both customer and the vendor this is just one example really a question in from Graab Tindi he says are you willing to give up quality standards if a customer is unwilling to pay for details following initial development it's customer money it's not all money so the most common way of running into this is a developer saying no we have to do it the triple way and the triple way maybe instead of 10 minutes we spent 2 weeks or something unfortunately and in these cases it's not the developer's money it's the customer's money so we explain to the customer this is gonna come back and it's gonna bite you in the behind because you know when you are maintaining this it's more expensive but look as long as the customer understands it may be in some cases if the customer doesn't care all that much like okay lifespan of this thing is gonna be a year it's not worth investing and doing it the right way so yeah if the customer demands it and if the customer understands the decision they are making it's their money it's not ours right so I'm not gonna talk a lot about this but there's there's something we can learn from construction industry believe it or not it's not the most dynamic industry you can think of so this is terminal 5 in Heathrow in London they built a new terminal a few years ago for about 3-4 billion pounds so you know a very large amount of money for a building project and they knew that most projects on this scale end up going horribly wrong like just completely over budget and behind schedule and everything so what they did for this is they researched all of the mega projects of this size in UK during the past 10 years and they figured out like what are the common things and how to do this differently and they came up with a completely different model of not trying to pass off all the risk to the vendors but actually having a model where we split the risk and sort of much much more like healthy relationship kind of a contract and it just turns out you know they managed to do it right on budget and on time and so on there are still some problems with it and if you go and do some research online on this there's some critique on it but it's actually a good read to go online and check the terminal 5 contract model and what was behind it because as an industry like we could actually really learn something from construction industry which I wouldn't have imagined before I run into this case so in this case we can get more sustainable relationships first of all something that lasts a long time good for both parties risk management and also better quality of life for everybody when it's like a good fair relationship everybody enjoys their working life a bit more nobody likes being in an abusing relationship not even at work so if you want to retain all of your employees that becomes a pretty important thing so I spoke also to James Scutz who's a sort of director for all the product implementations and big on agile in NBCUniversal so he sort of introduced agile to NBCUniversal so I asked him what does he actually ask for when he's looking for agile vendors and how does the RFP process go so that as a vendor you have better idea on what the customer is thinking so sure, yeah I think well I don't have a rule what I've had is really just a number to share what my experience is and I find any number to be using something agile has that experience that they're very passionate about and willing to share and we usually have some type of presentation that they're so really excited to share and what is your experience and how do you not have any processes to give examples how you've done that and usually for the vendors that have experiences that are good passionate and really willing to share that information when that conversation is quiet response is quiet and becomes uncomfortable when you know that vendor is comfortable and you know the best experience there but I find when you're interviewing vendors and talking to them those that have your experience are really excited to share so I always just ask and I couldn't agree more with James on this this is what you hear over and over again you need to trust your own process in order to sell it if you have an agile process if you trust it you're not going to be able to sell it I understand it's a chicken and egg kind of situation if you're moving to agile but you have to start small then On exactly that point Chris Rooney has a question he says agile requires high trust from the client on budget, timeline and goals so how can you create that trust with brand new clients if a customer is brand new to agile you have to start small that's the only thing you can do if you know them small wins initially you have to take a bit of risk yourself and I wouldn't if you as a company are new to agile I wouldn't go and sell agile to customers who are new to agile unless it's an existing customer with existing trust relationship in place I would rather sell agile to customers who are used to doing agile and I would also be pretty honest about like you don't have loads of agile experience yet but if you can sell your team otherwise and if they are experienced in agile it may be beneficial relationship still for both of you so same thing and I ask also from Bertu about this so let's see what he says oh sorry alright alright so do we have any other questions at this point one from Anand again says is there a case to split the product management and project management roles in the vendors team aren't the two contradictory that may be slightly off-scope for this session but I probably wouldn't I would try to keep one thing but that said if you have a product portfolio that is being run with agile then you need to have like agile portfolio management and all that but we can talk about that but if you have a product portfolio that is being run with agile then you need to have like agile but we can talk about that afterwards I guess because that's quite detailed alright so what if after all of this the customer is still saying we want to have fixed everything let me do an example of this about one and a half years ago we had a large global media company approaching us with an RFP that was a completely fixed everything RFP so they were saying like okay you know we would like to work with you guys we've heard nice things about you but you know this is our approach so we sent them a short reply and saying no thanks we explained them what's wrong what's likely to go wrong with their approach and say that they basically told them in like four or five pages that these are the problems you will have with the approach you've taken so just told them no we got a reply in a day they were quite swift the reply was like thank you you have been shortlisted okay fair enough so it just happened that we explained what had happened with all of their previous project or quite a few of them and they were willing to listen so we got in we spoke with them we explained the problems to approach and they said okay fine let's start working together and let's do a different project we've done now a couple of large projects for them and they've been just fine actually the product owner on the customer end who took the risk and chose us and worked with us got a big massive promotion also afterwards after the first project so it went pretty well so now we have a very good cheerleader in this organization saying like no no all of this should go at job so you can take a few different approaches first of all if you get a fixed everything RFP you can just say no walk away it's cheap it's easy it's quick to do no harm done but of course you don't learn much and the customer doesn't learn anything then you can do the second thing that we do usually we also explained them why we don't do it we explained them what's probably gonna go wrong we tried to be brief so we're not gonna send them books or anything but they explained sometimes it goes wrong and the customer just says okay no no we need to do it our way sometimes what I just explained happens customer comes back and says okay let's talk we've seen these problems you are describing so what's your solution to these and then you can do the desperate thing and say like okay well I'm just gonna offer a fixed scope contract and try to do agile within it that's nasty you can try to do it but then you are trying to give all of the nice things to the customer and at the same time take all the risk to yourself and that's not very healthy long term business I know you can do it and I know you can succeed in it but I personally I wouldn't we've sort of built a company around agile from day one and we've never done anything else than agile so for us it's quite easy to say that just decline everything that is not agile but you know having run about 20 years of different professional services companies I understand it's challenging if you can't you know pay your salaries it's gonna be a bit of a challenge to decline and say no but if you wanna you know end up on a more healthy profitable business and more happy employees and I would decline these one way or the other this is also one of my motivations on talking about this topic quite often especially in the triple community I think this would be best for everybody if all of the really good shops would start saying no to fixed everything proposals would be great for the customers they would need to move to agile sooner they would only have the really crappy shops you know doing fixed everything and failing badly with that would be great with shops as well because you know more and more shops would be able to move to fully agile ways of doing business so I think this would be really good for everybody and I know more and more companies do this as well it's a perfectly valid approach, right so getting back to getting back to the original story what actually happened that went pretty much like like you could expect that we are going to add a lot of additional support for their teams and there's a lot of extra overhead for this so we actually had a couple of agile coaches there and all sorts of things they really really tried hard to struggle against going to agile they still tried to run around in circles basically when their media sales sold something they tried to just push it you know as a first thing and do a new project really like unhealthy practices around all sorts of things and just design everything up front still so we helped them internally say no a lot and in the end what happened is like they started succeeding in their projects after about six months after a year they started succeeding with other vendors as well now it's been four or five years we work with them a lot they are one of our largest customers today and almost all of their digital projects these days are successful so it was only a shift of mindset on how they actually you know go about and procure projects and how they treat their vendors and all this but it really took years it took a lot of work and most of the credit of course is to them I only take the credit on helping them to get on the right path and the rest of it then was all them so that's where the credit should go so that's really all I have and I think I'm almost about time as well so if we have a last question we can still take that one there's no more on Twitter at the moment but if anyone wants to tweet or step up to the mic I think we've got time for one question before the deadline we have 30 seconds so any last questions nope we can continue on Twitter thank you everybody or you can come afterwards here oh and please remember to evaluate the session I always forgot about this part thank you