Agile Projects

Projects need to deliver agreed benefits within set timescales, but in fast-changing environments projects also need to remain fluid and flexible. Charteris project teams and senior practitioners help our public sector clients ensure their projects are sufficiently agile to meet and exceed shifting expectations.

The Market Need

Because of pressure to deliver rapidly in a changing legislative and operational environment, many public sector projects are phased to deliver benefit incrementally. This allows an iterative approach in which the experience of delivering early benefits informs the approach to – and sometimes the specification of – later phases of the project. It also places a broad set of demands on the project manager who needs to apply traditional project management disciplines in a fluid environment while keeping a firm grasp on the commercial relationship with any suppliers.

The Charteris Response

Charteris provides:

  • Project teams to deliver against an agreed specification, budget and timescale.
  • Senior practitioners to help our clients' projects managers deliver major IT projects on time and to budget.

In both cases, we bring experience of agile project management alongside more traditional project management disciplines (as reflected, for example, in PRINCE2) and established solutions delivery frameworks such as the latest version of Microsoft's MSF (external link).

Exactly how an agile project works depends on the nature and scale of the job, but there are several common themes. Frequent (sometimes daily) builds help to ensure that a working product exists from the start. A prioritised list of desirable features is used as the basis of negotiation on the scope of each iteration. Use cases or user stories help to capture the reality of what users do and the 80:20 rule is applied to ensure that perfectionism does not delay delivery.

The commercial aspects of agile projects require particular attention because conventional commercial models are not yet well adapted to the concept of a series of 'time-boxed' releases with negotiable scope. Our project managers use their commercial experience to bring clarity to client-supplier relationships and to find pragmatic ways to incentivise both parties to behave in ways that reduce risk and increase the likelihood of a successful outcome to the project.

Contact us

For more details on how you can access Charteris expertise and services, contact

Andrew Rogoyski - Head of Practice, Government & Energy, or,
Roger Woods - Head of Practice, Scotland & Northern England

Address: Charteris plc, 39-40 Bartholomew Close, London, EC1A 7JN
Telephone: 020 7600 9199
Fax: 020 7600 9212
email: andrew.rogoyski@charteris.com, or,
email: roger.woods@charteris.com