Agile Project Management
Posted on January 30, 2010
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Agile Project Management
The term agile denotes the ability of the project management methodology to respond to the changing requirements in a controlled but flexible manner. When change occurs in the project, these methods provides the ways of allowing that change to be introduced to the project in an orderly way that attempts to maximize the benefits to the sponsor, while controlling the risks that the change introduces. Agile methodology may not suit every project, project manager has to identify the benefits of agile methodology and evaluate whether this technique will suit for your project.
Agile techniques reduce risk by improving communication and thereby getting more control over the project. Agile techniques reduces risk of doing wrong things, the risk of building right things with poor quality and the risk of being stuck in an endless cycle of design updates and reviews due to changing requirements or high level of complexity. We can describe agile project management as follows
Agile projects are feature based
While agile project plans are featured based; describing when the features will be delivered in the most current iteration. Agile projects planning do not have much visionary description of what shall happen in the project after the six months. Depending upon the priority of features, project manager can guess which feature will have to be delivered and how much functionality the team can deliver in the given period of time.
Agile project plan is sequentially organized
Agile project plans are organized keeping in mind to deliver the features on the regular or frequent basis. Usually the feature deliverable time bound iterations are 2-4 weeks in length. Due to this stakeholders have a better picture of the state of the project after using iterative end result as it is available.
Agile project plan is detailed at different levels along with the time frame
In agile projects, project managers have to face parallel affects the continuity of delivery of each features. These factors can be changes in the team, change in the priority of the deliverable, change in business conditions, better approach and techniques learned from previous iterations. Due to this, Agile project plans address multiple levels of detailing based on the given time frame. Team produces the detailed plan that includes tasks needed to deliver the functionality in the most current iteration. At the high level it is the release plan which highlights what functionality the team is planning to deliver for the next several iterations.
Agile project plan is owned by the project team
In agile project planning the team is involved with the stakeholder to decide what feature will be produced and the necessary task to successful deliver the planned feature in the most current iteration. After the plan is developed and approved, the team has to adhere to those plans. Hence when the team members are actually doing the work, they are the best judge to know what needs to be done when in a given time frame.
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