How to justify agile development with “hard” benefits? (Dave Nicolette, Jürgen Ahting)

Today, large organizations are taking a serious interest in agile and lean methods. But instead of "soft" benefits on the weight of anecdotal reports of success these demand more quantitative evidence that the new methods will be effective and successful before they can accept the upheaval of procedural and organizational change.
In this session, we classify principles and practices of agile and lean methods on the ease to measure, derive, or infer their "hard" financial value in a way that is credible to business and IT management.
We will also correlate the hard value with the four primary business concerns that are driving change in large organizations - reducing time to market, improving quality, aligning solutions with business needs, and controlling costs. Finally, we will tailor the value message to each constituency that is concerned with change - business management, IT management, development staff, production support, QA testing, etc.
In a facilitated discussion format, participants will collaborate to explore methods of quantifying the hard value of agile principles and practices against a stereotypical traditional IT organization. While we will provide some real numbers we expect participants to share their experience on which "hard" facts got them or their management persuaded to give the go ahead. Hence all participants will come away with some real numbers and with techniques for measuring and calculating hard value that they can take to their employers and clients and that they can use in preparing their own proposals and justifications for projects.

About the speaker

Dave Nicolette Dave has served in a wide range of roles in the IT field since 1977. He has been involved with agile development for the past four years, and is a Certified ScrumMaster. Presently, his main interests are the practical application of agile methods to enterprise IT, fostering organizational culture change to enable excellence through agile best practice, and collaborating with like-minded colleagues to improve the state of the art of the software profession.

Dipl.-Inform. Jürgen Ahting is CEO of the AMECO Ahting Media Consulting GmbH Quickborn (http://www.ameco.tv/en/). He has many years of experience as developer, systems architect, coach, project manager, organizational consultant and as business manager for projects and products. Turning an IT management consultant in 2001 he specializes as "professional customer" for those buying customized or creating custom information systems. As an Agile Business Coach he puts emphasis on making projects more agile and economical. His special interest is the enforcement of requirements for the technical quality of software, in order to make their life cycle costs calculable without increasing project cost. He nevertheless has managed to preserve his technical skills in Perl, Ruby, XSLT, and Oracle/SQL-performance-tuning. He studied computer science at the University of Hamburg combined with business administration (banking, finance and controlling).