Agile Project Management Essay

Agile Project Management

What does it mean to be agile? According to Dictionary.com’s definition, agile is the “ability to think quickly; mentally acute or aware” (Dictionary.com, 2017). If we were to relate agile to the project management world, we would be interested in the ability of management teams to quickly adapt and make decisions. In traditional project management, the project team, along with their formal roles such as project manager follows a formal process of detailed phases in order to define the project, project roles, and create detailed estimates to ensure the project runs smoothly. These definitions are formal and ensure that all possibilities are accounted for before running the project. Formal is the key word when we talk

According to Freedman, there are three fundamental flaws with traditional project management: that it isn’t possible to fully plan a large project, changes made late in a project can’t be protected and accounted for, and large projects shouldn’t be fully defined before beginning (techrepublic.com, 2009). Once these fundamental flaws were found, Alan MacCormack of Harvard Business School described three principles that could be used to replace the traditional project management methods. These principles were focused on software development. The early and continuous release of code, the idea of daily code builds with fast turnaround, and the idea of having a deeply skilled team were these principles (techrepublic.com, 2009). These ideas created by Alan MacCormack are what are cited to have created the relatively recent movement to agile project management which focuses not on formality, but on fast, lean, efficient and iterative management

Charles Cobb explains this method in detail in his book Making Sense of Agile Project Management: Balancing Control and Agility. There are five major phases of the agile project management model as described by Charles Cobb. Starting with the envision phase, the project team creates a vision of the product based on customer needs, product capabilities, quality and business constraints, and finally coming up with an approach of how to deliver the product. After a vision is created for the product, the project team moves on to the speculate phase. Within the speculate phase, the project team continue to develop their plan or approach to developing the product. To do this they define broad requirements for the product and create a release plan based on iterations along the way. Unlike traditional project management where exact definitions are created at this point, in agile project management this phase is only broad definitions that are expected to change throughout the project. The third phase is the explore phase where the product is created and tested in short iterations. Throughout the iterations, further requirements are defined as needed and testing is used to identify features for the next iteration. Once the product is delivered, the project team moves into the adapt phase. This is where the project team reviews the