Basically,
the word agile mean being able to move quickly and easily.
On the other hand, agile
is a methodology that describes how to manage projects and refers to a
disciplined project management process that encourage frequent inspection and
adaptation (Schwalbe, 2014). Agile
methodology or sometimes call agile software development is a concept or
approach to project management that help to respond to unpredictable of building
software. Moreover, it can promotes a project environment of adaptation,
teamwork, self-organization, rapid delivery and client focus. Agile today means
using a method based on iterative and incremental development in which
requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration. Again, it can be used
for software development or in any environment in which the requirements are
unknown or change quickly.
The
main benefit of agile project management is its ability to respond to many
issues as they arise throughout the course of the project. Making a necessary
change to a project at the right time can save resources and, ultimately, help
deliver a successful project on time and within budget. Agile Project
Management is about embracing change, even late in the development stage. It’s
about delivering the features with the greatest business value first, and
having the real-time information to tightly manage cost, time and scope. Frankly
speaking, agile project management reduces complexity by breaking down the many
months long cycle of building requirements for the whole project, building the
entire product and then testing to find hundreds of product flaws. On the other
aspect, agile methodology can be used for project management by centralizing
all of the release plans, release backlog data and user stories, task updates,
bugs, documents and communications into one developer workflow tool, helping
you to (For Agile Development, 2013):
-Deliver
releases of all sizes, from new products and major enhancements to quick bug
fixes, efficiently and with unprecedented speed
-Track
and prioritize incoming process or product from internal and external
customers, and schedule them for iterations based on urgency
-Manage
reports and content requests from product managers, so you can deliver on the
company's vision and customer's requests with a cost-optimized process
In
the meantime, agile project management uses facilitated work sessions with
business and IT to get to a shared understanding of the problem, the solution
and the plan. Agile Project Management helps to find the source of the problem
quickly through frequent testing. And even better, it gives you to the tools to
solve it because you have involved the right stakeholders continuously. It’s
about understanding self-organizing teams and the interaction between all the
roles contributing to the development process. And it’s about encouraging
collaboration and discovering innovative solutions, unleashing the power of agile
thinking. Agile Project Management divides these overwhelming project
management responsibilities among three agile roles (VersionOne, Inc., 2014):
-The Product Owner handles setting project
goals, handling the tradeoff of schedule versus scope, adapting to changing
project requirements and setting priorities for product features.
-The Scrum Master guides the team to
prioritize their tasks and remove impediments to handling their tasks.
-The Team Members directly handle most of
the task assignment, daily detail management, progress reporting and quality
control for the product.
Unlike waterfall, agile project management
continuously evaluates time and cost as primary constraints. Rapid feedback,
continuous adaptation and QA best practices are built into the team’s committed
schedules, ensuring top-quality output and proven processes.
To
put it into a wider view, scrum is the leading agile development method for
completing projects with a complex, innovation scope of work. One could view
agile and the scrum framework as methods that simply break down a big project
into several smaller projects, defining the scope for each one. More
importantly, the project management institute (PMI) recognized the increased
interest in agile, and introduced a new certification in 2011 called agile
certified practitioner (ACP) (Schwalbe, 2014). The use of
agile as an approach to managing projects has been increasing dramatically over
the last several years. It will somehow make project management easier. To
demonstrate, IBM is one of the companies that openly uses this method to
develop software. According to IBM, the use of the Agile Method means that
significant organizational changes will take place. They believe that many
agile software development teams will increase their chances of success by
partnering with a trusted guide (LINCHPINSEO, 2014). They help clients
implement their own agile software development strategies for their projects. Popular
agile methods include extreme programing, Scrum, feature-driven development,
lean software development, agile unified process (AUP), crystal, and dynamic
systems development method (DSDM) (Schwalbe, 2014). They all
involve continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and
other forms of continuous evolution of both the project and the software. They
are all lightweight, especially compared to traditional waterfall-style
processes, and inherently adaptable. What is more important about agile methods
is that they all focus on empowering people to collaborate and make decisions
together quickly and effectively.
In conclusion, it is everyone's (developers, quality assurance engineers,
designers, etc.) responsibility to manage the project to achieve the objectives
of the project. In addition to that, the agile project manager plays a key role
in agile team in order to provide the resources, keep the team motivated,
remove blocking issues, and resolve impediments as early as possible. In this
sense, an agile project manager is a mentor and a protector of an agile team,
rather than a manager. Last but definitely not least, it gives benefit in terms
of faster delivery of products to the customer, an improved ability to manage
changing requirements, and higher quality and productivity in IT and especially
for project management.
References
Agile Project
Management. (2014). Retrieved from
versionone.com: http://www.versionone.com/agile-project-management/
For Agile Development. (2013). Retrieved from
clarizen.com: http://www.clarizen.com/project-management-solutions/agile-project-management.html
Schwalbe, K. (2014). Information
Technology PROJECT MANAGEMENT (7th ed.). Boston: Course Technology,
Cengage Learning.
Singham, R. (2014). Agile
Project Management. Retrieved from thoughtworks:
http://www.thoughtworks.com/agile-project-management
The Agile Method Explained:
Beginners Guide & Summary of Benefits. (2014). Retrieved from linchpinseo:
http://www.linchpinseo.com/the-agile-method
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