It has been a real pleasure perusing your blog.

Seeing the various references made to Agile contracts on your blog – does it mean BT is open to negotiating an Agile contract with a prospective vendor? – I understand that perhaps differents parts of the organization may have different policies – but I thought I would ask?

I am also wondering if the fact that a company uses ‘Agile’ could be a differentiator during a bidding process.

Thanks.
Imran

As to MG’s point about corporate/individual goals, there was an article in a recent Harvard Business Review that suggested that overall strategy was often way-laid by the resource allocation implications of innumerable smaller decisions.

http://tinyurl.com/2q5omp

There is a simple covenant that is very effective in our delivery world. It is about aligning the bonus payment of the IT and business lead to a common goal of successful delivery of the project. When a common goal is shared, and it is strong enough (100% of bonus), it is amazing to see how solutions to obstacles are found, compromises are made, meaningless statusing falls by the wayside, etc. etc.

The unfortunate situation about compensation and bonus structures is that in most large organizations, not enough is variable vs. fixed. It’s usually not specific enough to an individual’s tasks but rather to the shared corporate objectives and values (I have never figured this out .. why must 100,000 employees all behave like lemmings towards a single goal). Why can’t bonus structures be purely task or individual project focussed ?