At O3 World, we have adopted key principles from the Agile method into our process over the last 5 years. Like many agencies, we too have faced challenges in adopting Agile. Justin Handler, our Head of Accounts, shares his knowledge and our approach to Agile in his article, “Agile In The Agency, is It Possible?”
Justin is a core member of the O3 team who has been with us for the past 7 years. He has been instrumental in streamlining the O3 process of managing online projects from concept to completion with his 9 years of project management experience. He has led the management of diverse projects, including enterprise product builds, mobile applications, sales tools, eCommerce websites and much more.
In the article, Justin mentions the difficulties we face when clients expect us to define the exact requirements of a project upfront. We are a digital agency, so we create digital products, services and experiences. It can be tough when the client demands are high in a digital landscape where change is constant. But, once we accepted the reality that our process will need continuous adjusting, tweaking and improvising, we were able to extract the key methodologies from Agile and make the process work for us.
He also dives deeper into how we manage Agile projects with fixed budgets. It is difficult to define structured requirements prior to design and development so we do our best to provide a high and low range budget to our clients. Our main focus to drive this process is client communication, ensuring we build a transparent relationship from the start. We put the budget to work for our clients’ business objectives and make sure that there are no surprises with where the hours are being burned. This also gives our Project Managers the flexibility to run an Agency Agile process.
Running Agile projects can be challenging, but it is possible. As Justin states in his article:
“It’s all about being flexible, involving the entire project team from the start, and overlapping design and development to gain efficiencies and increase collaboration.”
Check out the full article by Justin featured on DPM
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