The Blending of Traditional and Agile Project Management

Traditional project management involves very disciplined and deliberate planning and control methods. With this approach, distinct project life cycle phases are easily recognizable. Tasks are completed one after another in an orderly sequence, requiring a significant part of the project to be planned up front. For example, in a construction project, the team needs to determine requirements, design and plan for the entire building, and not just incremental components, in order to understand the full scope of the effort.

Traditional project management assumes that events affecting the project are predictable and that tools and activities are well understood. In addition, with traditional project management, once a phase is complete, it is assumed that it will not be revisited. The strengths of this approach are that it lays out the steps for development and stresses the importance of requirements. The limitations are that projects rarely follow the sequential flow, and clients usually find it difficult to completely state all requirements early in the project. This model is often viewed as a waterfall.

Today, business processes are more complex, interconnected, interdependent and interrelated than ever before. Additionally, they reject traditional organizational structures in order to create complex communities comprised of alliances with strategic suppliers, outsourcing vendors, networks of customers and partnerships with key political groups, regulatory entities, and even competitors. Through these alliances, organizations are able to address the pressures of unprecedented change, global competition, time-to-market compression, rapidly changing technologies and increasing complexity at every turn. Because of this multifaceted nature of businesses, projects that implement new business systems are also more complex.

However, huge cost and schedule overruns have been commonplace in the past. Looking at the numbers, the past project performance record is troubling:
􀀁 $80 -145 billion per year is spent on failed and cancelled projects (The Standish Group
International, Inc.)
􀀁 25% - 40% of all spending on projects is wasted as a result of re-work (Carnegie Mellon)
􀀁 50% are rolled back out of production (Gartner)
􀀁 40% of problems is found by end users.

The Agile Project Management Environment
Unlike traditional project management, which emerged from the construction, engineering and defense industries and dates back to the 1950s, APM was born in the twenty first century. In 2001, prominent software developers from both IT and software engineering domains, convened to arrived at a consensus on how the software development industry could produce better results. This meeting produced the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which states that the “highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
APM development is conducted collaboratively, with a small co-located team. There is minimal documentation as the team relies almost exclusively on informal internal communication. Again, this differs from the traditional approach where a considerable amount of time is invested in planning and a significant amount of requirements documentation is produced.
Agile Management Components
There are several key elements that provide the basis for APM. It is important to note that these techniques can also be used in traditional software development methods to improve project performance. They are:
- Visual control - This is a “cards-on-the-wall” method of planning to assist a team in organizing the work of the project.
- Co-located high-performing teams. In Agile development, all the key team members are co-located, including the customer/end-user, preferably in a work room. This approach greatly increases the quality of coordination and communication.
- Test-driven development. In cases when the customer is having a difficult time articulating requirements, agile teams often use test-driven development. Using the same successful Agile project team mentioned above as an example, the test cases were often developed first, and then the team backed into the requirement.
- Adaptive control. Everyone on the team is constantly adapting, which may make some team members nervous, especially those that crave structure. Because of this dynamic environment, the project manager needs to be seen as a leader, not a taskmaster.
- Collaborative development. APM relies on collaboration among all team members to deliver the results, capture candid feedback and implement learning’s on the next iteration of the solution. This is one of the strengths of APM - constant feedback and improvement.
- Feature-driven development. This practice greatly reduces complexity, because it allows the team to focus on one feature and only one feature at a time. For example, one team is working on Feature #4 and that’s the team’s only focus. They don’t concern themselves about Features #1-3.
- Leadership and collaboration rather than command and control. “The principles of APM are timeless. If you look at APM, it links much more closely to leadership. It addresses a lot of the steps that facilitate leadership much more than traditional management.
- Move from C (cost) to R (revenue) focus. Features are prioritized based on value, such as increased revenue or market share. It’s the business analyst’s role to ensure the Agile project team is not investing too much into the development of the new solution.
- Lessons learned. After each cycle, the team holds a lessons learned session to determine what they can do better on the next iteration. As the team learns, it adapts how the members are working together to continuously improve team performance.

Conclusion

“The traditional project management approach,” Augustine reports, “is a linear approach where you try to get it all done at one time. You do a lot of very detailed planning at once upfront and then deliver it in what’s known as the ‘Big Bang’. That industrial age thinking has spilled over from software development to other projects as well.” This is the heart of the difference between Agile and traditional project management. The ‘Big Bang’ now comes from the greater flexibility and collaboration APM provides. “Just enough” planning is done up-front. As each increment of the system is built, the team gathers input and learns from customer feedback.

“At its heart, project management, whether you are doing traditional or Agile has very similar principles. It’s about doing a good job for the customer. It’s about leading a team. It’s about delivering measurable business results,” says Augustine. Many of these principles or practices can be implemented into most team-structured environments.
Incorporating Agile management techniques into projects fosters a focus on the benefits of each feature. In traditional project management, the teams strive to finish the project on time and under budget and often lose sight of the overall benefits the entire effort is intended to bring the organization. It’s important to remember the strategy the project is expected to advance as well as the total cost of ownership and not just the project costs.

Published in PM World Today - May 2007 (Vol. IX, Issue V)
By Kathleen B. Hass, PMP,
Project Management Practice Leader, Management Concepts