Do Project Managers like Agile?
From time to time I hear Project Managers, and their managers, criticising Agile. Those being critical are sometimes those who haven’t ever used Agile on a project. They say Agile leads to a project’s scope being unbounded, requirements not being recorded, there being no schedule, the finances not being managed and status not being reported.
As a reminder, the Agile Manifesto promotes:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Some of the key observable ingredients of Agile are: - Appointment of a Scrum Master
- Active input from a Product Manager
- Kanban boards
- Daily Stand Up meetings
- Breaking large scope elements into smaller pieces
- User Stories and estimation
- Backlogs and backlog prioritisation
- Sprints
- Management of Work In Process
- Retrospectives
The focus of the elements of the Agile framework is to manage the delivery activities. User Stories are assigned to Sprints and Daily Stand Ups are used to bring the team members together to discuss: - What was achieved yesterday
- What is planned for today
- The blockers that exist
This approach lends itself to innovation initiatives where new ground is being broken, where prototypes need to be developed, where incremental delivery is beneficial, where a tried and tested delivery process is not known and where the external environment is changing frequently. Agile projects adopt a ‘fail fast’ approach where the team will ‘pivot’ if the current path hits a dead-end.
None of this precludes the use of familiar Project Management artefacts such as: - Solution Architecture Documents
- Business Requirements Documents
- Commercial Contracts
- Project Schedules
- Project Budgets
- Finance Trackers
- Risk and Issue Registers
- Status Reports
In fact, these are not only permitted under Agile, they are compatible with Agile and essential for the support of the project overall.
Agile supports clear and simple communication, visualisation of progress and the ability to change course to enhance delivery velocity.
These elements are of value on any project, whether Agile or Waterfall.
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