Dear client, dear buyer,

If I’m writing you this letter, it’s to wish you success in your projects.

Naturally, it won’t have escaped your notice that succeeding in a “fixed-price” project is an uncertain undertaking, despite the contract that binds you to your service provider. I suspect that if you’re mature, you’ve already understood that important projects, strategic projects, you’re not going to entrust them to an external company. This “fixed-price” contract that will leave with your requirements and come back some time later with a result that’s more than uncertain? A “fixed-price” contract whose participants you don’t know, perhaps you don’t even know their faces or their names, these people who are going to work on your project. Even though there are many fixed-price projects that work well, important projects, strategic ones, you take care of them, you don’t entrust them to strangers. You want to be close to their execution.

Historically, “forfait” is a crime committed with audacity…

In short, you have the wise intention of executing your strategic projects in-house, close to you, with people you know, in a word: through staff augmentation.

Staff augmentation is historically asset management (meaning value management?)

But staff augmentation worries you. You associate it with a sort of endless mission, without purpose, with a battalion of contractors who come to support your “middle-management” (Is it staff augmentation that made it apathetic?, or was it being apathetic that triggered staff augmentation? Is it really apathetic, or do you constrain it from being able to be dynamic? That could be another question). And sometimes you’re not wrong.

Could agile restore staff augmentation’s letters of nobility?

Agile will allow you, by focusing its action on producing value at regular and rhythmic intervals, to quickly give you visibility, certainties, achievements. Agile will offer you a clear cadence that will give you real predictability about the continuation of your execution. If the project is heading for a wall? Well, you’ll realize it quickly and save the long useless months that would have served to mask this state of affairs.

• Yes, but with staff augmentation, you tell me, the project will never end.
• On the contrary, by producing what has the most value at the beginning, you’ll be able to stop it earlier.
• Then you tell me that you don’t know what it will cost you! (if you don’t have a defined budget)
• And you’re right! But the agile contract should allow you to get the best possible for the invested budget, the best value/price ratio.
• With fixed-price I have certainties!
• Hmm… is that really the case?

PS: both in form and substance Yassine tells me that I’m way off the mark on this one! gasp, I’m going to need to question myself again.