brilliantly. My morning was their evening so I would get to say,
‘OK, yesterday we agreed you were going to do these five things.
Did you do them? How’s it going?’ ”
There were members of Rayner’s team working on the project
in California as well, he adds. “At the end of the workday, each
team would hand off to the other shift. That’s more complex than
a traditional agile arrangement where everyone is in one loca-
tion, but I was willing to take responsibility for the time, cost,
and feature tradeoffs,” Rayner says.
That factor — having an IT leader take responsibility for the
project — is a key differentiator, he adds. “A lot of I T managers
make the following mistake: They’re under pressure to reduce costs,
so they decide to go to an outsourced company that promises to use
agile methodologies. They think that not only will they get lower
labor costs, they’ll get the higher productivity of agile.”
That kind of thinking can lead to trouble because using the agile
methodology means giving up some of the cost savings tradition-
ally associated with offshore outsourcing. Indeed, Rayner says,
Fly.com’s success was due in part to the fact that his company paid
a higher price to work with the outsourcer’s most experienced
developers. “They were every bit as important in solving business
problems as they were in solving coding problems,” he says.
Outsourcing agile development may not save that
much time and effort either. “You have to be willing to
work as hard with an outsourced partner as you would
with your own people,” says Rayner. “And your super
users need to be involved to help determine features.”
The worst outsourced agile disasters occur when the
client company thinks it can hand off responsibility to
the outsourcer. “At one company I worked with, speed
of delivery was worse than before the agile outsourc-
ing,” Rayner recalls. “At the root of the problem was this
attitude that, ‘now that we have an outsourcing contract,
they have to be the ones to do it. They have to be agile
and fast, and we don’t have to be in touch every day.’ ”
He notes that there’s another reason — usually unspo-
ken — why I T leaders sometimes choose to outsource:
So they can deflect responsibility and gain a scapegoat in case
things go wrong. “You can’t go to the business sponsor and say, ‘I
told them to do what you asked, and it doesn’t work. We’re going to
fire this outsourcer and get a new one,’ ” Rayner says. “That’s often
This kind of thinking can kill an agile project before it even
gets started, he says. “The very spirit of agile is to have mutual
trust and respect, and a flexible relationship where you know at
each decision point exactly what cost, time and feature tradeoffs
you’re making. That’s hair-raising to some engineering leaders
because they can no longer hide behind the contract.”
before requirements are even needed. It might also mean they use
agile practices to develop comprehensive business cases and metrics.
All of that is usually not a discipline an outsourcing company brings.”
“In principle, the agile methodology says that you have a cross-
functional team that is colocated. You can make decisions on the
spot and you can look at things together,” adds René Rosendahl,
senior manager in the project management office at Kelley Blue
Book in Irvine, Calif. The company uses an outsourcer in Beijing
to provide agile development for its website KBB.com and other
products. “With offshoring, you are forced to separate the product
owner from the rest of the team, and you need to write things down
and expect delays in decision-making. Does that mean you have to
compromise some of these agile principles? I think the answer is
yes. You cannot apply the principles in the same way you can with
in-house teams, but you hold on to them as much as possible.”
Picking the Right Agile Outsourcer
Choosing the right outsourcing company may be the biggest part
of the challenge. “Pick a partner that’s really going to be your
partner, not someone who’ll just deliver that [statement of work]
to you,” advises Daryl Broddle, vice president of technology for
SciQuest, an online procurement technology provider. SciQuest
has used an outsourcer to do agile development for
years. “I have a personal relationship with the CEO
of that company,” Broddle says. “He visits me once
or twice a year when he’s passing through. Neither
company would be where it is without the other.” (See
“Team Augmentation,” page 22.)
Perhaps most important is a willingness to face up
to the profound changes that a move to agile requires.
“There was one large logistics company in Europe
with an outsourcing agreement with a very well-estab-
lished systems integrator,” Adamopoulos recalls. “The
systems integrator’s model wasn’t helping the logistics
company. It wasn’t getting new features fast enough
and was losing market share. Every time I T executives
had a conversation with the outsourcer about agile,
the outsourcer would make some minor change, but then things
would go back to status quo.”
The logistics company hired Emergn to train both its own team
members and its contacts at the outsourcer in using the agile meth-
odology. Once they were trained to employ agile properly, they
were able to shorten the average release time for a new feature from
300 days to 47 days, Adamopoulos says. “The logistics company
reclaimed about 21 million euros in revenue that year because they
were able to move feature releases up 10 months. In the past year,
they’ve also regained a fair amount of the market share they’d lost.”
He was especially impressed with the outsourcer’s ability to
completely change the way its developers worked. “That was a
huge win, and it’s gotten company wide recognition at the out-
sourcer,” he says. “They’re beginning to use the agile methodol-
ogy within their own organization as well. They recognized it
was something they needed in order to remain competitive.”
Large or small, an outsourcer willing to make changes like
these is probably a good bet if you are facing the challenging
prospect of outsourcing agile development. u
Zetlin is co-author of The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology
Professionals Don’t Understand Each Other and Why They Need
Each Other to Survive.
» Andrew Newbigging says Medidata
chose not to outsource its agile development work.
Is ‘Partly Agile’ Enough?
If you do decide to outsource an agile project, one question to consider early on is just how much of the traditional agile methodology you
want to adhere to. Because working with an outsourcer will almost
certainly prevent you from using a completely agile framework.
“In most cases, the outsourcing company would be using scrum
as an agile practice,” Adamopoulos says. “While this is fine, more
and more companies are figuring out that they can use agile across
a whole set of areas in the software life cycle. They might use agile
in the early idea-management phase and the vetting of an idea well
