We have covered the basics of project management and what it takes to become a project manager. We have covered the phases of the project lifecycle: initiation, planning, execution, and closure. We have also reviewed the various tools and techniques to manage and communicate the plan. We have also discussed how to deal with the various challenges, risks, and issues that arise along the way. If you have completed all the courses so far, congratulations. If you are joining us now, welcome. Either way, you are on the path to a new or career advancement in project management. Agile is also the most interesting and flexible approach to project management. Agile is not a project management methodology in itself, but rather, it is an overarching approach and philosophy to delivering value to the customer, which is the goal of most projects.
Though not a specific methodology, there are many frameworks and methods that fall under the Agile umbrella.
Waterfall is a common project management technique that sequences phases in a sequential or linear fashion. You complete one phase at a time and don’t move on to the next one until it’s complete. You then start at the top of the mountain and cascade down to the base of the mountain. The term Agile refers to being able to move quickly and easily. It also refers to flexibility, the willingness and ability to change and adapt. Projects that employ Agile project management take an iterative approach. This means that the project process is often repeated many times during the project’s lifecycle. In this case, the team works within many short blocks of time called iterations. Individual iterations may be repeated depending on the feedback received.
During each iteration, the team takes a subset of all the activities in the project and does all the work necessary to complete that subset of activities. You can think of this as having many small waterfalls for each activity. This iterative approach not only allows projects to move forward quickly, but also makes them much more adaptable to changes. Hence, the term Agile implies flexibility, iteration, and openness to change.
But what does Agile Project Management mean? Agile Project Management is an approach to project and team management based on the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto is a collection of 4 values and 12 principles that define the mindset that every Agile team should strive for. So, in very basic terms, Waterfall is linear, sequential, and discourages change once the process has begun.
Agile methodologies naturally emerged in the 1990s, when the software industry was booming. Software startups such as Google were paving the way for more software products to be built in less time.
Meanwhile, the big tech companies of the time were looking for ways to build better software faster and stay competitive. By the way, software is not just the apps and websites we use every day. So in this competitive and growing environment, it wasn’t enough for companies to simply make new, innovative products. They also had to innovate the very processes they were using to develop those new products.
In 2001, the leaders and creators of these new processes united to find common ground in their respective methodologies and solve a problem. The problem they agreed on was that companies were so focused on planning and documenting projects that they lost sight of what really matters: satisfying customers. So these leaders came up with the Agile Manifesto to provide guidance to others about what really matters in software development: keeping the process flexible and focusing on people, both the team and the users, rather than the end product or deliverable.
Even if you’re not working on a software project, you can still apply Agile. Agile has seen great success in the software industry, and its values, principles, and frameworks have been widely used in almost every industry.
The agile methodology you’ll learn is heavily influenced by lean manufacturing principles that originated in Toyota’s car factories in the 1930s. Agile methods are also gaining traction in industries such as aviation, healthcare, education, and finance.
Agile was developed as a response to the inflexible linear process of waterfall. While waterfall aims for predictability and resists change, agile acknowledges the uncertainty and unpredictability of the world, market, and users. For instance, a customer may request feature A, but upon receiving the final product, they may realize they actually wanted feature B. Agile addresses this issue by obtaining customer feedback more quickly and ensuring that the team builds what the customer truly desires. Embracing an agile mindset involves constantly seeking ways to work more efficiently. This is achieved by streamlining processes without compromising product quality or value. The key to streamlining is reducing waste. For example, unnecessary documentation is a form of waste. Another example of waste is spending weeks or months developing a feature only to find out that customers, who are also users and stakeholders, do not like it. Both of these forms of waste can be minimized or eliminated by increasing collaboration between the team and stakeholders. More collaboration leads to less documentation and quicker feedback on the product. Let’s consider some more differences between Waterfall and Agile: Three main aspects of a project are requirements, documentation, and deliverables. Requirements are the conditions or tasks that must be fulfilled for the project to be successfully completed. They can be thought of as a set of criteria within the project scope or a list of specifications that must be met.
In a Waterfall project, you will likely need a product requirements document that outlines the scope and requirements of the project. You will also need formally approved project plans, and there may be a dedicated team responsible for creating and approving these plans. Additionally, there might be a change control board, which is a formal process for managing changes to requirements. All of these components are designed to safeguard your team from creating something that your client or stakeholders do not want, and to minimize changes that could lead to scope creep. A formally approved project plan is effective when the desired end product is known and understood, such as leading a project with clear requirements and goals based on mandated regulations. However, in cases where this is not true, waterfall teams risk building the entire deliverable only to discover that the customer does not like the end result. In Agile, requirements are treated more dynamically and are expected to change as the team receives feedback and new information. Typically, at the beginning of a project, there is an initial set of requirements or feature ideas. However, this list of requirements and features continuously grows and changes throughout the project. Teams collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize requirements, always moving the most urgent or valuable items to the top of the list.