Dan Suciu

Change represents the focal point of various studies, books, articles and conferences from all fields of inquiry. Undoubtedly, our personal and professional life is more dynamic than ever, being filled with unforeseeable challenges day by day. The world around us changes at a high rate as part of (mega)- and (mini) revolutions across several walks of life. Agile is also about change, more precisely about the changes that teams have to deal with. Agile values and principles focus on the benefits and speed of change. Agile represents a major change, both for the teams which want to implement a particular Agile methodology and for the ones which are constantly evolving.

It is strange that today, on a quick search of the word Agile on the internet, you get two categories of answers: a first category contains explanations regarding what Agile is and how it functions and a second category that argues why Agile doesn’t work. There are obviously two points of view: one that offers to introduce you to the Agile secrets and the other one, less numerous, but which is beginning to be heard louder and louder, which thinks that the Agile practices are harmful and can negatively affect the development of software applications.

Imagine Cup is an annual IT competition addressed to students worldwide. The competition is organized by Microsoft and its purpose is the development of software solutions which target the mankind’s most important problems and have real chances to become commercial soft products. We can say beyond any doubt that Imagine Cup is the most important competition of the kind, taking into consideration the number of countries and teams taking part, the quality of the developed solutions and, last but not least, the prizes offered.

The idea of this article occurred to me several months ago, while I was preparing a presentation for the conference “Even mammoths can be Agile”, which took place in Cluj-Napoca this spring. It sometimes happens that certain things appear to be very clear and obvious at a given time, but when you begin to study them closely you are surprised to find out the contrary. This also happened when, trying to study the efficiency and benefits of adhering to the good practices in Agile, adopted by certain organizations and project teams, I have reached some conclusions that are far from being considered optimistic.

According to human resources specialists, IT in Romania is one of the few domains in which the number of available jobs has raised after the beginning of the economical crises and one in which companies compete for the best specialists. The idea that keeps coming up is that in the competition with the low costs of the employees of other geographic areas (such as, for example, Asia), the solution is to migrate from outsourcing to one’s own products, or, in a less radical process, to change the relationship with the clients and turn the status of mere executant (such as it could be induced by the outsourcing model) into a status of consultant (which would turn the IT companies into partners for their customers).

One of the first things you note when you read an article or a book about IT project management is that IT projects differ greatly from all other projects. Even when the main topic is related to project management in general, there are direct references on the ineffectiveness of some methods when we are dealing with software projects. Unfortunately those differences are not always explained and the focus is rather on describing solutions, which are more or less efficient.