what is agile project management

what is agile project management

Understanding Agile Project Management: Principles, Practices, and Benefits

1. Introduction to Agile Project Management

Project management stands out as an increasing profession with many techniques, methods, and instruments upwards of its architecture. The growth of companies and several organizations demands professionals and qualified methodologies to meet the challenges imposed by market competitiveness. The main challenge of project management is to work in adverse scenarios, where the complexity is usually quite great. The accelerated growth in technology creates innovative products with acceptable quality and expectations for much more competitive costs. In order to settle this type of growth, it is essential that management techniques and principles must also be consistently managed and implemented. With an intensifying competitive environment and the increasing demand for product quality and short delivery times, developing companies have been forced to embrace methodologies that assist in agile project management.

Agile project management was born due to the need for today’s more complex, competitive, and globalized world to extend management techniques and practices to the field of project management. It allows organizations to provide their clients with predictable project delivery and excellent quality in the development of new products while achieving cost reduction and productivity gains at all stages of the project. The architecture of the Agile project management approach is supported by 4 knowledge areas: adaptive, value-driven development, innovation-centered environment, and performance level of the team involved. This chapter describes the principles and practices of the Agile Project Management methodology focusing on 4 Agile principles – Understanding Client Needs, By Delivering Value by Incremental Stages, By Managing Risk in Real Time, By Adapting to Change and People Impact.

2. Key Principles of Agile Methodologies

Think on a small scale: deliver features and components of your solution in small increments as soon as they are ready to be delivered. Prepare for change: This addresses the degree to which the solution is subject to changes, both in terms of capability and requirements. Seek feedback frequently so that the team has timely opportunities to adjust. Keep the working solution up to date. Allow for multiple ways to test and compare the systems. Various tools and techniques can be used for testing, including code reviews, refactoring to improve the design, continuous integration and inspection, and serious play. Be creative to find the best solutions. This addresses creativity and innovation on the part of the team. The team should remain enthusiastic and committed to the customer. The intention is to encourage development team members to work in an environment that is conducive to creativity and innovation. It also ties in with other principles. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts its behavior accordingly. The aim of Agile project management is to do what your project needs to succeed. Agile project management.

This section provides an overview of the main principles associated with the Agile Manifesto. By mastering the following principles, Agile project managers and teams will be better prepared to realize the benefits of delivering customer value early, often, and on an on-time, on-budget basis. Frequently referred to as the Agile Manifesto, these revolutionary directives have guided and positioned countless project teams and product development efforts for project success with exceptional results. They include customer expectation management principles, quality control principles, team-centered principles, and a focus on valuing the working solution over reamed-up front documentation principles. As you will see, each principle is both manifesto brief and to the point.

3. Common Agile Practices and Techniques

Daily Stand-up Meetings: The “daily stand-up” (or “daily scrum” because of its origins in Scrum) is a coordination and communication meeting. Wall Planning: Agile combines natural concepts with visual display to get the advantages of both. When teams create often, they put up the story cards, defect cards, and tasks. They might also use sticky notes, index cards, or sketches to picture other issues they’re focused on: an outside-the-box idea, a bottleneck in the configuration-management process; new ideas for adding business value. It doesn’t matter what they display, as long as the team believes that maintaining these displays benefits them. The common traits of their displays are that they’re visual and act as a magnet to draw the team’s attention to particular issues that they believe matter. Value is created, and value is a principle throughout agile. Agile practitioners recognize that if the team does something because someone in the organization said so, but the team doesn’t believe what they’re hearing, the results will not be of high quality.

Agile project management provides the agile team with the tools they need to enable the collective management of the project. It further ensures the effective use of these tools by providing a disciplined framework that describes and delineates the roles and responsibilities appropriate to the agile team. Agile practices are mechanisms that enable the team to actively manage the project. When the team is creating the release plan, the system is updated to show the capabilities or stories that the team expects to implement in the identified release. When the team completes those stories, the system is updated to show that they are done.

4. Benefits of Implementing Agile Project Management

Another benefit is the development team’s more integrated and successful nature. Tightly-knit development teams can improve product quality by increasing information flow, transparency, and product testing. When the development team believes that it can accomplish the tasks that it is focused on, many other tasks become simpler and faster. If there are a few individuals who do not believe that they can sometimes meet an objective or task, the energy and the perseverance of the group fall as a result. Ultimately, the potential for budget overruns or missed deadlines is minimized when companies utilize agile methodologies.

There are many benefits to implementing agile project management. These include the following: customers receive working software more often, teams are more integrated and successful, the potential for budget overruns and missed deadlines is minimized, and the team works together more cohesively to achieve company goals. Additional benefits include the ability to respond to changing requirements and more efficient delivery of products. When customers receive visible functionality faster and at frequent cross sections, they experience a reduction in quality risks. Not only do they purchase a product more often, but they have the freedom to make changes to the product that give flexibility in development efforts.

5. Case Studies and Success Stories

1. Adapt Software Development: Using Agile Practices in a Traditional Project for Success in a Regulated Environment Project Background: Modern global and financially-oriented businesses require flexible approaches to rapidly acquire a new business solution that meets their needs. As information technology (IT) has become the backbone of competing in the global market, tightly regulated environments need to ensure IT business solutions are sound and meet regulations while changing in a rapid manner. In early 2006, an attempt to develop an internal application caused long delays, without a completed system. An agile method was suggested. Was this solution-wise in this regulated and traditional environment? Didn’t true agile mean pure agile? Success factors highlighted were that IT can act as a “business driver” to compete, that an adaptive framework allows the introduction of any agile practice “incrementally”, and that teamwork and effective code drove the project forward to get the project done. The development was an evolutionary process, as the business people learns the main uses of the application. 2. Agile Adoption in a Public-Sector Organisation Wants to Enhance the Project Outcomes 3. Developing a Responsive System for Supporting Tests and Disease Diagnosis—iProduct: Testaceum 4. Agile in Mexico 5. EasyStart and FocManager Provide Business Agility 6. Communication Across Disciplines—Achieving Visual Project Planning 7. The Role of Love supporting Expert Code Craftsmanship as a Backbone for Strong Business Agility 8. The Performance and Exception Handling Aspects of an Online Environmental Data Processing System Using the Design Patterns 9. Building School Administration Data Portal Using Data Warehousing Approach

In this section, I share some stories to provide more evidence of the great result of using the agile concept and practices. These examples illustrate the rich set of possible outcomes from using an agile approach for the full range of organizations and industries such as finance, web development, health, public services, and industry-wide transformation. The cases are selected to show representation of different geographic locations and relevant details of their situation, practices, results, or any difficulty. From these examples, it is clear that organizations most likely to experience successful software development project outcomes, when using an agile project management methodology, have certain characteristics in common. Those organizations are flexible, committed, and willing to embrace change. Also, the team members adopt the concept and practices of Agile. The project stakeholder support is strong.