Agile and Beyond 2018

Cost accounting structures are complex, deeply entrenched based on long years of hard experience, and effective in satisfying executive decision makers. Ironically, they are very costly, as well. Project-based costing continues as the management accounting approach of choice within Agile transformations, even after two decades of proven success with Lean and Agile alternatives. In addition to the costly overhead, project-based costing contributes to delivery unevenness leading to waste mostly in the form of multitasking. It contributes to a mindset of anti-patterns resulting in overburdening of the people involved. There is an easier way, and this presentation will recommend a field-tested approach based on activity-based costing techniques adapted to the Lean-Agile paradigm of fixed cost fixed time variable scope value stream delivery on a cadence. It will explore the valid reasons for resistance by financial and accounting departments to change in favor of pure activity-based costing, Beyond Budgeting, and Lean accounting. It will then present a field-tested integration approach which favors enabling Lean-Agile decision making over the mechanics of budgeting, time reporting, and variance tracking. Attendees will leave with practical ideas which they can implement immediately using only a spreadsheet, with examples based on bulk data export from such Agile Lifecycle Management tools as CA-Rally, CollabNet-VersionOne, or Jira Agile. Finally, attendees will come away with a deeper appreciation of the power of Agile portfolio hierarchies and how they align closely with kaizen.