What is Agile Methodology? And how can it be used for project management?

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