Agile in Practice – Procurement in practice

I believe there’s a lot purchasing professionals can learn from agile software development; which values iterative development and process adaptability over large-scale, long-term locking down of requirements – imagine a vendor relationship that is actively managed and can be easily dismantled vs a 15 year outsourcing agreement.

The theory is that the additional effort that directed to managing the process on an ongoing basis is more than compensated for by the reduction in time and effort required to get the project off the ground and the reduction in the risk of getting it wrong and having to write off the entire project.

But it is important to keep in mind that any methodology that you adopt must be continuously evaluated for suitability to your company’s culture.

Attivio is a strong supporter of agile development yet they are quite willing to divert from pure agile development to suit their circumstances.

We all need to be as flexible – we need to keep abreast of the cutting edge thinking in procurement but we also need to adopt it to fit our corporate culture. But, like the Attivio quote below, we need to not be ashamed of diverging, we need to be proud of it and, if it works, to view it as ‘best-practice’ in our corporate context.

Note: While many of our approaches aren’t “pure” Agile, we believe we’ve created a best- practices process that embodies the “spirit” of Agile in that it has been developed iteratively, with the constant input of the engineering team based on key Agile principles.

via Agile in Practice: Managing Requirements.