Managing Change Orders: Understanding Fixed Scope, Fixed Capacity

by Jim Highsmith

At the Cutter Summit 2009 conference in early May, I was talking with an executive from a company that contracts for large government projects. This company has been doing agile development but has often run into a common problem: governments and others often want vendors to be agile and adaptable, but also sign contracts with a fixed price and schedule. During development, when they ask for changes and the vendor tries to mitigate the impact of the change request, the agency staff responds, "You aren't being agile; isn't this an agile project?" I've run into this before. Customers want to push agility too far -- they don't want to make tradeoffs; they want something for free.