> Agile stops working the moment you need to sign any form of contract with anyone, because nobody is going to sign a contract that doesn’t tell them what they are going to get for X amount of money.
Plenty of companies sign contracts like that, and it's not particularly controversial. Pay $X, get Y developers to work for T amount of time, with no guarantees what those developers are going to deliver.
I'm not at liberty to disclose company names, but I live in Finland and I can tell you it's normal here. It's basically equivalent to "renting" workers. I would be willing to bet that "rent-a-worker" industry exists in Denmark as well, and that it also includes IT work.
But rent a worker is small scale. It is not signing a multi million euro contract.
Consultants are a thing here, and they may be the closest companies get to not knowing what they buy.
I mean, I’m not saying that the other way works. All our major IT systems are delayed and over budget, but there are detailed and outlined requirements that aren’t delivered.
I've seen deals where a company sells a pack of consultants to a multi-year project with a price tag of over 1M euros. I don't know if this happens when the scale is 10M+, but it does happen at 1M scale.
Plenty of companies sign contracts like that, and it's not particularly controversial. Pay $X, get Y developers to work for T amount of time, with no guarantees what those developers are going to deliver.