Managing 3rd party clients
I've joined an organisation that has a number of clients, some of which run waterfall due to the nature of their industry and in how work is signed off.
My organisation has adopted some agile principles where possible, but is still very much tied to time-boxed, back-to-back, right-to-left commitments for projects. This means that people are often overstretched as commitments have already been agreed (by business).
This 3rd party sign-off process takes time. Often work starts with requirements not fully defined (we are still talking monolithic BRD documents here).
So work starts, and yes, the requirements change (eventually gets signed off), impacting the time-boxed dev & test teams.
So I've followed agile principles in other organisations, and I want to promote agile and accept that requirements are going to change and it's ok to drop scope in order to achieve dates or move dates (not so easy with a 3rd party).
Moving to a true agile process is achievable, but I can only see this if the business buys into it and stops committing to finger-in-the-air dates.
Anyone got any tips in how I can influence business to change their approach?
My organisation has adopted some agile principles where possible
Why? Who actually wants the organization to become more agile? Does the MD or CEO want this? Are clients now demanding it?
Mr Cobb,
A clue to answering your question lies within the question itself,
how I can influence business to change their approach?
I'd suggest that you read up on Change Management, and in particular, the roles in change implementation. See What's the Difference Between a Change Agent and a Change Champion? E.g., it'll be very useful to have a Sponsor to help you with this.
Having said that, you'd want to first have a good understanding of the reasons things are the way they are, beyond what is obvious. Existing processes can embody implicit knowledge (i.e., not written down), and so it would be wise to find out about it (if it exists) rather than to simply attribute existing processes to inertia to change.
When it comes to implementing changes, it's useful to adopt the idea of a 'tempered radical' (see The Everyday Leadership of ‘Tempered Radicals’), especially the concept of 'small deviant actions'.
Finally, a quick word about the agile process. Have you considered Kanban? This is because Kanban is meant to allow
organizations to start with their existing workflow and drive evolutionary change
(https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/kanban/)
Hope this helps!