Follow RSS
By Sandra VanWyk-Fancher, Vice President of Operations
You’re a born Project Manager: you love lists, you live to organize and plan, and you enjoy evaluating risks and alternatives. Even the family holiday dinner brings out assignments and due dates.
So when the environment changes and there are new rules to being a successful Project Manager, how do you adapt? The number of professionally trained PMs keeps growing, yet our project success rate remains the same. We need to rethink our approach. If we can’t adapt to increasing complex projects, we will fail.
The changing project landscape calls for alternatives beyond the traditional Waterfall approach. One promising alternative is Agile Project Management. I recently attended a PMI class that taught us “old timers” how to adapt to innovative processes.
The most significant change is that Agile Project Management is just that: agile, non-rigid, flexible (does that scream scope creep?). There is value in both the Waterfall and Agile methodologies, and knowing when to use which method is a key to success.
The best advice is project manage your project management! Waterfall is perfect for projects that have low variability, low complexity and few unknowns. Construction and repeatable work fit best with the Waterfall approach. In contrast, Agile works best when complexity and uncertainty is high.
Agile provides high visibility, lots of inspection points and the ability to change the scope based on status. Agile affords constant feedback and checkpoints to make sure you are on track, allowing you to define the uncertainty as you go.
As a Project Manager, your process changes, your team structure changes and your lifecycle changes. Rather than focusing on the planning (as with the traditional model), Agile Project Management focuses more on the execution phase. The triple constraint is replaced with meeting business objectives and speed to market. Agile welcomes in high bandwidth of communication and active problem solving, which helps to find defects right away.
So be adaptable, select the right approach and enjoy success!
2 Comments
Hi Sandra,
The problem right now is that all these fresh Project Managers are being taught Waterfall, even the PMP is based on Waterfall, and not Agile, as Agile mainly only applies to projects with high uncertainty (usually IT Projects).
I have an article about Agile Risk Management, discussing the difference between traditional risk management and agile risk management. I think it’s an interesting read and it complements your article.
I am interested in republishing your article on PM Hut, please email me back or use the “Contact Us” form on the PM Hut site in case you’re OK with this.
I could not disagree with the comments form PM Hut more strongly!
The PMBOK is a project management framework. How you deliver a software product changes the way you apply the framework and Agile needs a much lighter touch from the overall project management system but it is still possible to project manage an IT project using Agile as the delivery method, using the PMBOK process. For more on this see: http://mosaicprojects.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/managing-agile-projects/
One Trackback
[...] Go to the author’s original blog: Agile Project Management: A Solution to the Changing Project Landscape [...]