In order to succeed on today’s market, the companies need to create new and innovative products, reduce the development time and customize them based on their customer’s demands. The traditional managerial practices, although highly structured and stable, do not favor innovation and are too rigid for responding quickly to the changes in the business environment. Agile project management on the other hand, is a modern approach to managerial practices that distances itself from the traditional, process-centric approaches by encouraging innovation, a shorter time-to-market and by anticipating the changes created by the customers or competitors.
Agile project management encompasses a collection of practices, with clearly defined objectives, a set of values for the leaders and practitioners and also a life-cycle framework consisting of five stages (Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt and Close) . Beside this, Agile project management replaces entirely the traditional “triangle of balance” of time, cost and scope and redefines the performance measurements according to a new set of goals that reflect the Agile principles and values.
So, the agile project management practices are steered by five main objectives:
- Continuous innovation: by replacing the authoritarian, structured environments with adaptive cultures, based on self-discipline and self-organization, agile project management will foster innovation while still fulfilling customer requirements and delivering customer value
- Product adaptability: agile project management strives to to deliver on future client requirements by designing adaptable products
- Improved time to market: agile project management tries to improve the time to market by employing an iterative process, focusing on the value-adding activities while eliminating waste and overhead.
- People and process adaptability: agile management encourages learning and aims at building teams that that are comfortable to variations; the learning process is not seen as an expense but rather as an part of delivering value to the customers
- Reliable results: agile management values reliable process over repeatable ones when aiming to deliver a valuable product to a customer
Regarding the values of agile project management – the Declaration of Interdependence and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development highlight the values for project leaders (value over constraints, teams over tasks, adapting over conforming) and developers/practitioners respectively (interaction over processes, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan).
When it comes to the project life-cycle, the agile approach replaces the traditional Initiation, Planning, Execution and Closing phases with other five phases: Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt and Close. These are more suitable for supporting a more realistic development process that evolves the product based on the knowledge gained in time and customer’s continuous feedback.
Last, but not least, the performance measurements of an agile project change compared to the traditional one. While the traditional performance indicators were scope, cost and schedule in an agile project the indicators are value value, quality and constraints (building a releasable product, having a good enough quality and acceptable costs and time).