Agile Project Management in practice
Agile is a project management philosophy made popular through its use by software development teams who found it more effective to deliver project milestones in smaller stages as opposed to delivering the entire projects towards the end of the lifecycle and then going into a QA phase.
In 2001 a group of project management experts got together to find a better way of managing their approach to projects after their observation that too many projects were failing too often. They came up with the Agile Manifesto which consisted of four key principles that valued;
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
This philosophy has since evolved and grown in popularity to the point where an ever increasing number of project teams now use elements of key agile principles to improve the success and performance of their development teams and projects.
So what does agile look like in practice?
Crucial to the practice are daily huddles or scrum meeting whereby team members are given the chance to discuss progress from the previous day, define what they will do that day and to raise any looming problems or challenges. The meeting should be short, fun and free-flowing. Take any discussions that bog the meeting down offline and resolve separately. Scrum meetings should be fast, fun and empowering to all team members.
Retrospectives are used to diagnose past issues and come up with better ideas for the future. The core of any retrospective meeting should include gathering insights and generation of new ideas that will help future projects flow more smoothly.
Kanban boards are a simple way to manage projects whereby tasks are visualised and managed in a three bucket system of ‘to-do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’. The main benefits of Kanban boards include the ability to easily visualise projects leading to effective prioritisation and bottleneck elimination, the ability to adapt more quickly, and increased productivity.
If you’ve tried other methods of project management like waterfall methodology and found them to be rigid and inflexible, why not try incorporating some of the above elements into your next project to see if they can make a difference to your project outcomes.
