12 Agile Principles — #4 of 12

Business People and Developers Must Work Together

This principle emphasizes a partnership approach between the project team and the business sponsors. This is very consistent with the Agile Manifesto value of “collaboration over contracts.”

To implement this principle, both the business sponsors and the project team need to feel joint responsibility for the successful completion of the project. This calls for a much higher level of engagement of the business sponsors than is commonly found in many traditional projects where the implementation of the project might be almost totally delegated to the project team.

The degree of engagement, of course, should be appropriate to the nature of the project and how the business sponsors get engaged might be different depending on the circumstances. For example, Scrum has a role called the product owner that provides the day-to-day business direction for the project, but the direction might not be limited to that. In a large, enterprise-level project, there might be a number of other stakeholders that need to provide input and need to be engaged somehow.

Designing an approach that gets the right people engaged at the right time is very important for making the project successful.