RallyDev.com
Wed 11 Mar 2009
Agile Cuts Costs by a Factor of Four – or More!
An advanced Agile team with the ability to stop delivering and end early (page 4)
In this scenario, the Agile team has attained “innovate” and is finding innovation internally and can effectively determine when to stop working on less valuable efforts. Not only did they end early, they also spend 1/2 as much time in upfront business case development. To learn more about the discipline of brutal prioritization, see “Brutal Prioritization in Agile: cuts costs by not building the fluff,” and to learn about the ability to focus and have the whole team know why you building what you build, see “Why do you develop and operate software?”
As a result, the cash flows for this advanced Agile team looks as follows:
| Delivery Only Right Features and Stop Early with 25% Productivity | |||||||
| Q0 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q5 | Total | |
| Value Producing Throughput (income) |
$0 | $300,000 | $550,000 | $750,000 | $750,000 | $750,000 | $3,100,000 |
| Operating Expense (costs) |
$50,000 | $187,500 | $187,500 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $425,000 |
| Net Profit (per period) |
($50,000) | $112,500 | $362,500 | $750,000 | $750,000 | $750,000 | $2,675,000 |
| Cumulative Net Profit |
($50,000) | $62,500 | $425,000 | $1,175,000 | $1,925,000 | $2,675,000 | |
As a result of these cash flows, the project would have the follow business impact:
Net profit over 6 quarters $2,675,000 (290% better than waterfall)
ROI over 6 quarters 6.3 (7.7 times better than waterfall)
Net Present Value @ 10% $1,721,179 ($1,403,000 better than waterfall)
Self funding date ~5 months from start of business case (12 months better than waterfall)
Break even date ~ 6 months from start of business case (15 months better than waterfall)
Thanks for this excellent post.
I’m sure a lot of Project Managers out there will strongly disagree with you (I wonder how come no one commented on this post yet), Agilists, of course, will definitely agree.
I’m not going to discuss the charts or the numbers, but I have to say that cutting costs by 4-6-8-10 is no easy thing, and I don’t think it should be attributed to the methodology (alone), the Project Manager and the Project Team should have the lion’s share of the credit for such achievement.
PM Hut – I totally agree! – truly going agile versus adopting agile in name only is not just a change in process. It takes the whole team and organization to get 4 to 10X better productivity and it changes everything including strategy, organization, enabling technology and process. The point of my post was to show that the managerial economics are possible using document changes observed in large, scale distributed teams.
I hope that helps?
Ryan
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