Welcome.
The intended audience for this site includes Project/Program/Portfolio Managers, Product Owners/Managers, Procurement, Legal, and Finance. The goal is to help everyone succeed who may come into contact with approving/paying/landing services or deliverables through 3rd party talent, when the services or deliverables rendered cannot be adequately defined, or must change as value delivery begins, where the binary expectations of classic vendor management contracts are wholly inadequate.
The Problem With Agile Delivery Through Traditional Contracts
If you have known Scope, Schedule, and Budget, traditional contracts have resulted in happy vendors and customers for hundreds of years. While T&M or CR contracts are good for vendors with vague requirements, they are not built to control costs over long periods of time, nor do they give escapes/mechanisms to protect a customer from a vendor that either starts or becomes ineffective, or needs to change the level of expertise on the team frequently to solve evolving impediments/requirements/Definitions of Done that team will discover shortly after the contracts have been inked.
During the traditional RFP cycle, it is common for different vendors to offer wildly different solutions to the same problem, where aspects of both are highly desirable, but not offered by either vendor. To include these new requirements takes the customer back to the beginning of the cycle, tendering a new set of requirements. It can become a requirements analysis death spiral where many meetings are held (even billed for, in some cases), and nothing gets done.
Additionally, as project size and count increase, the risk of fraud and failure modes are directly proportional, where a vendor may charge a customer for benched or fictitious staff, or bill multiple customers for full-time talent working only part-time, both virtually undetectable to the customer at scale. We need better ways of protecting customers, while ensuring good vendors can profit from good performance, without increasing overhead on either party.
The Solution
An RFP and value delivery process that allows great ideas offered by competing vendors to be collaborative and additive, while maintaining and respecting competition, in a contract that includes excellent risk mitigation for the buyer, with near-infinite flexibility for the vendor, enabling and incentivizing good profit for good outcomes.
If this sounds like what you’re looking for, start with:
An overview of the differences between the traditional and Agile RFP processes.
A refresher on the different kinds of traditional delivery contracts.
The failure modes modern companies experience in delivering Agile value via traditional contracts.
An in-depth explanation of the parts and pieces of an Agile Contract.
Ultimately, this site offers guidance creating contracts that protect all parties and give everyone the best chance of success, however- this advice can only be descriptive, not prescriptive. It must be the responsibility of your entity’s procurement/legal department to apply the artifacts gathered here within your own risk/legal tolerances, within your own local and national frameworks. While this knowledge may help ensure better protections and outcomes, especially in the failure modes, you must ensure your entity is protected legally with your own lawyers before/during/after you enter into any contract.
Updated March 30th, 2024
