Agile Project Management – 3 Important Considerations Before You Adopt it

Recently we had an interesting discussion with our customers, who is a devoted agile project manager. The discussion was centered around pros and cons of, differences and similarities between managing projects using ‘Traditional Methodology’ and ‘Agile Methodology’; and typical use case scenarios; how effectively it is being used in IT projects, consulting and manufacturing and some of

Agile-Project-Management

the engineering projects and what are inherent limitations of using Agile project management approach in few other industries.

No One-Fit-For-All

Though I came across the term “Agile Project Management” way back in 2000, it was during 6-7 years of my career before Zilicus, I have had opportunities to observe adoption of agile methodology in IT product based companies as well as services companies. The only word I would like to use here is: ‘Convenience’. In most of these cases, I realized company prefer to interpret agile methodology in different ways because

Customers’ expectations
Its own culture
Management’s buy-in
Everybody else seems to be doing it and we don’t want to be laggard

Agile Risks?

Certainly agile project management methodology is useful for customers, who are expecting iterations of “working” elements of project deliverables. This approach greatly reduces risk of being non-aligned with customer expectations. However one needs to be careful that if crucial elements of projects are not considered properly, it can also induce some of the structural risks (that you may not remain lean to adopt new changes).

Agile Project Manager

One should not forget that he crucial player of this game change exercise is ‘The Project Manager’ who needs to be a strong project manager who should enable team to remain focused on final objectives (and in turn intended deliverables), and connect the dots through all iteration to keep the deliverables ‘along-the-lines-of-final-expected’ product/service. Because agile approach is about ‘Less Planning’, project manager has to balance the ‘lean’ creative part and expected project delivery.

I would really like to write about agile project management – basic principles, advantages, case studies, its limitations, etc.

Image Reference: Keeping-Agile.com.