The article—posted to my Medium account—reflects on the challenges that Agile-first agencies face when they acquire new clients who often have a preference for traditional, Waterfall project management.
When we’re accustomed to agility and flexibility, we must adapt to provide the certainty and structured approach desired by a new client, balancing the innate human need for both certainty and excitement.
This adaptation involves documenting a delivery approach and being less agile about Agile.
But does changing our approach mean we’re no longer Agile?
Once your client induction process is complete, you’ll need to make a decision on whether their next project has a key stakeholder that’s going to be high-impact. With those two key stages in the bank, it’s time to evalute the best way to move forward.
The options below are not intended to be a definitive list. Indeed I can imagine a rewrite of this article or addition of other options in the future. What you will be able to take from reading these thoughts however is the number of ways you could move forward (or not) with a client who isn’t ready to—or won’t—consider your purely Agile delivery approach.
Most of us are lucky enough to have worked with amazing clients during our agency careers. Those clients where your key stakeholder doesn’t just pass you a project and stand back. They sell you on it, buy into it, stay by your side for it and celebrate the success with you when it’s done.
But what exactly is it about those people that makes them different from the average stakeholder? How can we evaluate a client early to consider just what their team will bring to a project? Can we build them up to be more aligned before our project gets started?
At the beginning of October last year I wrong a blog post called ‘Retirement Diary – Week One‘. As you can probably infer from the title alone my intention was for it to be the first in a series. I was planning to document what taking a step back from work looked and felt like for me. I hoped it would both allow me to return and review the experience at a later date, but also that there might be some insights I could share which would be helpful for others.
It quickly became clear however that I wasn’t actually done with work, or the impact working too much in 2022 and 2023 had on me.
Taking three months off was never going to be as simple as closing my laptop on a Friday and walking off into the sunset. I’ve been sharing that as the dream when I tell the story, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen that way. As I’ve been saying to the teams I work with for years, offboarding is even more important than onboarding and needs more time than is every available. I’m only following my own advice, and in my situation I’m able to ensure nobody is left in a difficult situation.
Where the role I’ve played in an organisation has been for a long time and the work was complex, it takes more than a few weeks to check it’s all documented, handover responsibilities and know it’s all in safe hands. Even more important than that, if the relationship is strong you feel a need to ensure the humans are able to take on the tasks you used to be involved in.
