This value encourages project teams and their sponsoring business community to work collaboratively at all times, and to focus on valuable business outcomes rather than just material outputs. Collaboration from the earliest stages of a product also leads to: early insights and innovation around the business problems and opportunities; clear understanding of potential solutions; and a clear focus on early delivery of business value from the endeavour.

Typical commercial contracts assume that a traditional sequential or ‘waterfall’ process underpins development –
one which relies on extensive and detailed up-front analysis design work – and, accordingly,‘a fixed price for a fixed specification’ is the standard for project contracts. Agile projects emphasise collaboration and the ability to respond to changing needs, and therefore contracts need to reflect this.

In pure project terms, a contract is effectively any document that needs to be ‘signed off ’. Signing such a document indicates that all parties have agreed to work to achieve, or work within the constraints of, what the document describes. In an agile world, it is very important to ensure that all parties follow the principle of documents being created only where they add value, and to be ‘light touch’ and ‘guiding’ wherever possible. Locking down detail too early has been shown to be counterproductive and inefficient, as every change to the detail should really be agreed and signed off by all those who signed the original document.

The problem is that, in reality, people with the authority to sign such documents and authorise changes to it are signatories who are rarely interested in such detail and at times not even knowledgeable enough to deal with the real intricacies.To optimise the value of any contractual documents that are necessary, they should be co-created and focus on what is needed to make the endeavour successful rather than focus on how blame for failure should be appor tioned.