In fact, it is one word which illuminates the foundation of agile project management practices and their necessity: speed. Take the advent of new and often disruptive technology that are permeating operations in almost all service providing and product manufacturing industries, or look at the fast-pace business landscape resulted from extremely competitive markets; speed is the constituent of many deriving elements of today’s market, which forces IT managers to decide and act quickly under incomplete information and high uncertainty. As Gary Chin notes it in his book Agile Project Management, “teams need to be light on their feet … they need to be agile!”
Agile project management (known also as iterative life cycle) is defined in environments with high uncertainty and high urgency. Traditional project management approach – waterfall – are not able to cope with rapid and constant change in software projects, and fail to deliver proper functionality under uncertainty, for several reasons:
- Rigid procedures are needed to regulate change.
- Hierarchical organizational structures are means of establishing order.
- Increased control results more static, rigid hierarchies.
- Employees are interchangeable “parts” in the organizational “machine”; it is costly to adapt them to change and prevent negative consequences.
- Problems are solved primarily through task breakdown and allocation.
- Projects and risks are adequately predictable to be managed through complex up-front planning.
Agile technologies such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and SCRUM are meant to reduce the cost of change throughout the software development process by approach the problem iteratively with rather small durations for iterations. Moreover, an agile management approach tends to consider the project manager more as a leading position, and less as a task enforcement and assignment role. Therefore, as developers extend their involvement in the project, they can locally organize their favorite tasks and align them with the general vision of the goal, which is guided and reinforced by PM throughout the project life cycle; this leaves much more space for creativity in agile environments than traditional approach.
On the other hand, chaos can be prevented or controlled by setting general standards and simple rules and light touch with just enough control to foster emergent order. As elaborated in Agile Project Management by CC Pace Systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS) in nature (e.g. flocking of birds, schooling of fish) exhibit similar practice. Among CAS common practices, light touch control stands bold with the implication of applying “just enough” control which ensures that all plans are synchronized with PM’s vision, and are based on functionality to be delivered. Hence, teams will have a level of autonomy to quickly adjust solutions to changing situations on their own, while the desired vision of the project is maintained.
When traditional PM should not and cannot be dismissed, agile PM expands the opportunity of success in projects for which the future is not certain and determined. Traditional PM lacks agility to adapt rapid and inevitable changes; agile tools and methodologies, if aligned with those of traditional PM, can bring about necessary flexibility to IT software development.
Sources
Gary Chin, “Agile Project Management, How to Succeed in the Face of Changing Project Requirements”, 2004CC Pace Systems Inc., “Agile Project Management”, 2008Scott W. Ambler, “Agile Project Planning Tips, http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/agileProjectPlanning.html, Website – Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_management
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