AgileSHAPE When the Environment Is Hostile
Vantage Logistics is running a PRINCE2 Agile project to replace its warehouse management system. The AgileSHAPE-style assessment scored the environment badly on several axes: the customer is a single internal operations director who is unavailable for more than 30 minutes a fortnight; the team is split across three sites with a four-hour time-zone spread; the technology includes a 20-year-old integration layer with no documentation; and the organisation's governance requires a full change board for any scope adjustment. The project manager, Tomas, proposes to 'do agile properly' by insisting on a co-located team, a daily on-site customer and a two-week sprint cadence. The board is sceptical.
1. Evaluate Tomas's proposal against the AgileSHAPE assessment. What is he getting right and wrong?
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Tomas is right to use the assessment to drive tailoring, but wrong to treat the ideal as non-negotiable. The assessment tells you where the environment is ready and where it is not, so you tailor to the reality rather than pretending it away.
- Customer availability (poor): insisting on a daily on-site customer is unrealistic and will fail. Tailor: a named product owner proxy with delegated authority, a fixed fortnightly 30-minute decision slot used for prioritisation only, and asynchronous written decisions between times.
- Distributed team (poor): co-location is not available. Tailor: overlapping core hours, strong information radiators, and deliberate investment in remote collaboration; accept a slightly longer cadence if needed.
- Legacy integration (poor): this is a genuine technical risk; it argues for more discovery/spike work up front and explicit quality tolerances, not less.
- Governance (hostile to scope change): a full change board for every adjustment will kill agility. Tailor by negotiating delegated tolerances so that flexing within an agreed scope envelope does not require the board.
Tomas's instinct-'do agile properly'-would set the project up to fail and then blame the organisation.
2. What should Tomas take to the board, and in what form?
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He should take a tailoring proposal framed as risk management, not as a request to relax governance. Specifically:
- The assessment findings as evidence-showing why each deviation is proposed, linked to the specific axis (customer, distribution, technology, governance).
- Concrete adaptations, each with the risk it mitigates: proxy product owner (mitigates decision latency), overlapping hours (mitigates coordination loss), discovery spikes (mitigates integration failure), delegated scope envelope (mitigates change-board paralysis).
- The residual risks he is accepting, so the board can decide with eyes open.
- Tolerances and triggers-what would cause him to escalate.
This respects the board's governance role while giving them a decision they can actually make. Presenting 'we will do agile properly' as a fait accompli would breach the 'tailor to the project environment' principle and likely get the whole approach rejected.