Financing Agile Delivery with Forecasts at the People Side of Software Meetup
During our August 2018 People Side of Software meetup in Chicago, Robert Pieper explained how to finance agile delivery with forecasts.
Sound familiar..? Your team’s been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You’re estimating your work using abstractions like “story points.” The predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. Something doesn’t make sense and you find yourself having a hard time explaining it to senior leadership.
Finance departments and PMOs are trying to invest wisely and mitigate risk. They need to understand what projects to fund and which to avoid and looking at big scary numbers. However, they’re still using the same methods they did before by mitigating risk with big plans and committed dates.
How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking in large-batch fixed cost, scope, and time projects? In this session, we talked about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches.
