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Using Agile for long term vendor contract

Last post 11:14 am May 14, 2018 by Ian Mitchell
4 replies
09:39 pm May 13, 2018

Hi

Our organisation is about to embark on a 5 year contract with a major vendor for enterprise software delivery. They are a major software organisation, and we are using 5 years as it makes MUCH more sense financially.

Of course, the challenge is that requirements change over years, so what we are want now may not be the same in 4 years.

Any ideas on how to tackle this and make change a positive aspect to this deal


07:46 am May 14, 2018

From pure theoretical Scrum point of view, it would be nice to be able to terminate the contract after every single Sprint Review, if the progress is not satisfactory / there is no more work to be done. Of course this is probably not the case in a 5-year long contract :/

What measures will be in place to handle situations I mentioned above?


08:21 am May 14, 2018

Has the contract been framed in terms of a 5 year supply of agile delivery services? If not, why not?


09:42 am May 14, 2018

Hi Ian

i guess that’s my question - how would you frame a long term contract in the spirit of Agile?


11:14 am May 14, 2018

There was a burst of activity in the agile community on this matter about 5 years ago.

Gabrielle Benefield and Susan Atkinson:

http://www.flexiblecontracts.com/

I have an old post:

https://sites.google.com/site/wicmitchell/home/from-the-agile-manifesto-to-evolutionary-contract-models

Kane Mar has this:

https://scrumology.com/an-overview-of-agile-contracts/

 


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