In this episode of The Project Shrink Podcast I am talking to David Webb of Exigen Services. We are talking about flex-agility: their outsourced, fixed price, agile-based application development offering. Earlier this year I talked to Alec Miloslavsky, CEO of Exigen Services, and I got a lot of feedback on this topic. Your feedback let to this followup interview.

We are focusing on the agreement with the client. As David explains, this approach is actually an explicit decision about which party will take what risk for what price. For the customer the fixed price offers a safety net, the maximum amount that they have to pay. In the agreement they leave more than normal room for changes which are done in an agile fashion.

• Why would customers want to go for this type of arrangement?
• How do you explain the rules of this new game?

Questions I will be addressing in the flowing interview with David Webb.

You can view the video below… or follow this link.

On his blog Noop.nl, Jurgen Appelo is making a strong case for adapting your software development approach according to the circumstances. He recently wondered why being agile is not about being adaptable and doing whatever it takes to make your project a long-lasting success any more.

Jurgen introduced Scrum into his organization. He didn’t follow every advice given by the agile community; he used the principles he thought to be neccesary for the situation he and his teams are currently in.

And it worked.

In this video chat we discuss his experiences with Scrum and the curse of dogmatic use of “recipes for success” in software development.

He is located a couple of miles away from my home town, so, this is the first ever “Project Shrink On Location”

In this video chat I am thrilled to talk to Esther Derby.

We talk about self-organization in teams. What is it? What is it not? What’s the role of a manager in a self-organizing team?

Esther is one of the rare breed of consultant who blends the technical issues, and the managerial issues with the people issues. She is well known for her work in helping teams grow to new levels of productivity. She is also co-author of “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great“.

You can view the video below… or follow this link to YouTube.com.

In case you “forgot” why we are discussing self-organization, I advice to read my post “Structure For Resilience“:

“According to Wikipedia: “Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.”

In contrast to a traditional central plan-and-control organization this would allow for individuals to act fast upon changes in the environment, it would allocate the proper resources to a problem more efficiently. There is no central bottleneck for information which consumes time. There is no central point of decision that has only a fraction of the collective mental capacity.”