Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Rethinking Performance Measures for Agile Development

A recent Business Week article proclaimed, “There is no more Normal.” With businesses in the throes of pervasive change, the traditional emphasis on “following the plan with minimal changes” must be supplanted by “adapting the plan to inevitable changes.” If agile development practices are about focusing on and delivering customer value, then how can adherence to traditional scope, schedule, and cost be a good way to measure performance? It can’t. Jim Highsmith explains the need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to instead focus agile software development success on value, quality, and constraints. Even today, many agile teams are asked to be flexible and adaptive and then are told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals. They are asked to adapt—inside a very small box. If we are to truly bring agile values to our organizations, then we must change our performance measures. To paraphrase the Agile Manifesto, it’s not that scope, schedule, and cost are unimportant but that value and quality are more important. Jim explores the rationale behind moving to this new set of agile performance measures.

Jim Highsmith, Cutter Consortium

The president of Information Architects, Inc. and director of the Cutter Consortium’s agile consulting practice, Jim Highsmith has more than thirty years of experience as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer. He is the author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Agile Software Development Ecosystems, and Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems, winner of the prestigious Jolt Award. Jim is co-author of both the Agile Manifesto and the Declaration of Interdependence for project leaders, founding member of the Agile Alliance, and cofounder and first president of the Agile Project Leadership Network. Jim has consulted with IT and product development organizations and software companies on five continents.

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