Is agile consultancy a contradiction in terms?

Towards the end of 2009 I decided that I no longer wanted to be a technical director and really really wanted to be a full time agile coach. This had been a significant part of my last two roles and was the part I enjoyed most, and certainly most of my successes in this arena were attributable to agile transformations. But this meant consultancy, and there was one tiny little niggle in my mind:  could I retain my integrity and keep doing the right thing?

One of the things we teach is resolving conflicts and conflicting goals between stakeholders. And the nature of the consultants role means there are two stakeholders with conflicting goals:

1. The client who wants maximum value for minimum cost in the shortest time possible
2. The consultant / consultancy who wants maximum revenue and profitability and the longest possible engagements.

Before I go any further I should say that I am pleased that I have managed to retain this integrity and my current employer does in fact eat its own dog food. However that is not always the case. In my early days as a consultant all of my work was on a freelance basis – and very often through consultancies. Here is one example of this type of conflict:

Me (to consultancy): They are in pretty good shape and there is no longer a need for a full time coach on site – I suggest that I leave them to get on with it and scale my involvement to one day per week, but make myself available for more than this if they request it. That way we can deliver the right amount of value.

Consultancy (to me): That would be short sighted. We have a PO in place for another (n) days on a full time basis. There is massive opportunity for ongoing consultancy with this client but we should burn this PO as quickly as possible so that we can get them to commit to spending more money with us.

Get the picture?

While I was freelancing I was really excited to get a gig with one of the largest IT consultancies in the world (regular appearances in the top 10 of the fortune 500). Part of the excitement was that I have never yet been to any agile training / presentation / seminar where this company’s logo did not appear prominently on the who is using it page, and have heard many speakers talk about how agile has transformed there own business.

The reason for the engagement was that they were in danger of losing a major account because of the perception that they were not delivering value for money – and needed help in turning this around. My brief was to work with both the customer and the delivery team to prove that this was not the case, or identify what needed to be changed. I very quickly realised that the reason for the perception of reduced vale for money was: well reduced value for money over time. There were a number of really bad smells which included:

• Contracts that specified number of story points that had to be delivered per sprint – with penalties
• Estimation behind closed doors (by management – not the teams that would do the work)
• Contractual obligation to increase the number of story points delivered per sprint
• An estimate is a contract
• Detailed analysis of task level estimation vs actual time spent (with corrective action of course)

The behaviour that this drove was that over time estimates simply got bigger (around a factor of 5 in 18 months). This way the consultancy met its contractual obligations in terms of number of points delivered. To avoid being censured for inaccurate estimation loads of padding was introduced at multiple levels, including commitment per sprint. Work simply stopped when that commitment had been met. The consultancy was crowing about the fact that they were continuously delivering more value per sprint (i.e. more points) and the client was complaining that it was getting less for each sprint – and the client was right.

I could have spent the rest of the engagement writing a report and providing recommendations, which is exactly what both parties were expecting. Instead I got the agreement from both parties to run a project for 3 months with the authority to change any existing processes and ignore any contractual limitations in order to demonstrate what could be achieved. (I did provide a backlog and make it clear what I planned to change and why). The results were nothing short of spectacular. In that period we more than doubled the velocity of the two delivery scrum teams and identified and prioritised the business value which meant that the product was delivered to market a full 6 months ahead of schedule (revised schedule because it was already a year late!!!).

At this point both the delivery organisation and the client were really excited about what they had seen and proposed that we used this work as a model for transformation of the rest of the delivery organisation. The client was also very up beat about using the consultancy exclusively for all future work so this was looking like a good win/win scenario, with a long and profitable revenue stream for the consultancy and the right value for the client. Until the bean counters got wind of it… My engagement was terminated from a very high level for no sensible reason. I later learnt from the person who engaged me the reason was: If we double our output we halve our revenue stream, why would we do that?

That was all around 10 months ago. This week I learned that the consultancy has lost the contract altogether and all future work is going somewhere else. Sounds like a dried up revenue stream and an awful lot of jobs to be shed from where I am sitting.

Oh and just for the record: I have removed the consultancy’s logo from all of my training material. From what I have seen they are not agile at all, they have merely adopted some agile practices so they can call themselves agile to get a tick in the box when bidding.