Projects@Work have an excellent introduction to Agile Project Management: Agile, By Any Other Name…
Agile, by any other name, would still look like modern project management. The value-driven benefits of scrums, stories and showcases have made sense well before the emergence of Agile. And they certainly aren’t incompatible with so-called “traditional” project management concepts and techniques.
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What are the practices that make up Agile today? The key ones are:
- Develop in short cycle times
- Plan short term (the next cycle)
- Develop only what is needed
- Close collaboration with the user
- High visibility and daily reporting
- Empower the project team
- Test in parallel with development
How do these differ from traditional approaches?If you come from a background of two-to-three-year development projects with a single, gargantuan deliverable at the end, then this may seem like a radical departure from business as usual. But for the vast majority of developers, who are managing projects with timelines in months not years, the benefits of short cycles and multiple deliveries are well known.
Likewise, the impracticality of a detailed long-term plan is also common sense, and most developers would sketch out a blueprint to allow them to plan ahead for resource requirements and other long-lead-time concerns. In fact, there seems to be a risk that nothaving a long-term plan would result in a loss of alignment with business strategy.
The ‘soft’ practices of empowering teams and regular management communication are more a characteristic of modern project management than the preserve of Agile, and certainly they are compatible with a traditional waterfall approach to software development. Well-run development teams do this anyway, and the old days of Theory X management have long gone, except in the most unenlightened organization.
Its a good overview and introduction to the ideas behind the various Agile methodologies and how they are very relevant and useful to “traditional” project management.
