Agile Project Management
Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout
its life cycle. Agile project management focuses on delivering maximum value against
business priorities in the time and budget allowed, especially when the drive to deliver is
greater than the risk. Agile Project Management is one of the revolutionary methods
introduced for the practice of project management. This is one of the latest project
management strategies that is mainly applied to project management practice in software
development. Therefore, it is best to relate agile project management to the software
development process when understanding it.
From the inception of software development as a business, there have been a number of
processes following, such as the waterfall model. With the advancement of software
development, technologies and business requirements, the traditional models are not robust
enough to cater the demands.
Principles include:
The project breaks a requirement into smaller pieces, which are then prioritised by the team
in terms of importance.
The agile project promotes collaborative working, especially with the customer.
The agile project reflects, learns and adjusts at regular intervals to ensure that the customer is
always satisfied and is provided with outcomes that result in benefits.
Agile methods integrate planning with execution, allowing an organisation to create a
working mindset that helps a team respond effectively to changing requirements.
Key agile skills
There are six key agile project management skills or attributes that all project managers
should have:
1. An ability to cut through unnecessary work and focus only on essential work
2. Sound judgment under pressure and the ability to remain calm under stress
3. Strong motivation and coaching skill to guide and support teams throughout a project
4. Exceptional organizational abilities to keep everything straight and prioritize
5. The ability to think and make decisions quickly as circumstances change rapidly
6. A high level of adaptability in order to accept change and reduce unnecessary confusion and
risk
The five phases of the APM framework, as introduced by Jim Highsmith in 2004 are:
1. Envision: In this phase, a product is conceptualized and all the stakeholders are identified.
The possible objectives of the project and the identification of the customer’s needs are also a
part of this phase.
2. Speculate: It deals with creating a features list of the final product and how the team would work to
achieve it.
The speculation phase normally revolves around two key activities:
Breaking down’ the project into a series of high-level milestones and deciding the expected
timeline.
Coming up with the initial understanding of the critical tasks of the project. Priority
to a certain class of tasks is given over others in this phase and the team members
decide on the way to maintain the quality of the final deliverable.
3. Explore: This phase is parallel to the execution phase and team members explore the
various alternatives to fulfil all the requirements of the project while staying within the
given constraints. The main focus is on creating value and maintaining the quality of the final
deliverable. This phase works parallelly with the Adapt phase because teams may have to
change their plan and execution-style if a customer demands it or if the feedback is not as
expected.
4. Adapt: This is perhaps the most distinguishing phase of this framework. The ability to
adapt to different circumstances allows the team to be prepared for anything that gets thrown
towards them.
By constantly taking feedback from customers and ensuring that each aspect of the project is
up to the end user’s requirements, teams can significantly increase their efficiency and
effectiveness.
5. Close: This is the final phase. Teams ensure that the project gets completed in an orderly
manner without any hitch. The final deliverable is checked against the updated requirements
of the customers and teams ponder over their mistakes in order to avoid them in the future.
Agile project management software
Companies using agile are likely to leverage software geared to agile development in order to
get the full benefits of this methodology. Here are just some of the agile solutions available:
Atlassian Jira + Agile: This is an agile project management tool that supports Scrum,
Kanban, and mixed methodologies. This project management software comes with a
comprehensive set of tools that help Scrum teams perform events with ease.
Agilean: Agilean automates workflow management for small and midsize IT
companies fitting different verticals. It is customizable and has 50 built-in templates.
SprintGround: This is a project management tool created for developers to organize
work and help them track progress.
VersionOne: This project management solution is built to support the Scaled Agile
Framework at all levels.
