A Tale from the Agile Coalface

In Deloitte we have always adopted a very practical approach to agile software development and have developed this over the years into a repeatable approach that we have used with numerous clients. At an internal meeting last Friday a client of ours who had experienced our agile approach for the first time spoke about her experiences. It was very encouraging, and a testament to the quality of our team who worked with her, to see how positive an experience it was. The fact that she was willing to take this time out of her diary at all to do this spoke volumes for the experience she must have had. By way of background the project adopted an agile approach to the building of a self service ordering and customer service portal based on SalesForce.com. In summary the client felt that:

• It was a very refreshing customer centric approach when compared to her previous experiences.


• It produced tangible results quickly that didn't involve dry requirements documents which in itself encouraged more involvement from the business.


• It facilitated change easily without the need for change requests - they even dropped some of their original requirements and added new ones they hadn't thought of as the project progressed.


• It enabled her customers to be a part of the development process (the portal was targeted at them)


• The speed at which a first production version of the software was available (8 weeks) was amazing (she quoted previous experiences where you would be lucky to have environments available after 8 weeks). In addition, at this 8 week point they had one of their most strategic customer live on the beta version.


• The speed to market facilitated by the agile approach and the salesforce.com customer portal provided them with a competitive advantage that has since enabled them to win a number of very significant contracts.