From the course: Project Management Foundations

What is agile project management?

From the course: Project Management Foundations

What is agile project management?

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- [Educator] Agile projects are great when business needs change frequently or the business wants to receive value sooner. Agile does this by frequently delivering small chunks of a product known as features. This steady release of deliverables requires a different approach to managing and implementing work. You guessed it. Agile Project Management. With Agile, work is performed in time periods called iterations or sprints. They typically last two to 12 weeks. The goal of each iteration is to deliver a complete, ready-to-use feature. That's how value is delivered sooner. And if business needs change, you can address that in a later iteration. Agile places more importance on people and interaction than processes and tools. For example, people communicate when there's a reason to, not because the weekly team meeting is scheduled. To facilitate interaction, business and technical team members work in the same location or use collaboration tools to achieve the same effect. With Agile, your goal is to produce a product, not reams of documentation. That doesn't mean no documentation. While the team is building features, documentation is limited to what they need to do their work. Documentation like user guides are added to the features list. The customer is much more engaged in an Agile project. In the waterfall approach, the customer negotiates requirements upfront and then waits for the end deliverables. In Agile, the customer collaborates throughout the development process, which means it's easier to meet their needs. Changes are not only expected, but welcomed. The Agile philosophy views change as a way to provide more value. With Agile, you can shift priorities quickly by adding new features in a later iteration. Agile performs many of the same activities in waterfall project management in a slightly different order. One way to think about it, the waterfall approach defines the scope of the project and then estimates the time, cost, and quality to deliver that scope. Agile looks at time, cost, and quality as fixed elements. Then you figure out which features you can produce given those constraints. The Agile methodology described in this chapter starts with the envision stage where you define the goal and the boundaries of the project. You then repeat the speculate, explore, and adapt stages to develop and test features. At the end of the project, you perform a closing stage once to wrap things up. Change control is done by prioritizing the backlog of features and risk is managed with frequent releases. If you're familiar with Agile, you might think Agile means IT projects. It turns out, Agile works with non-IT projects too, as long as deliverables can be produced and implemented in short periods and can be added to in the future. Agile works well for projects with changing business needs or a desire to produce value quickly. If you want to practice, identify portions of the hospital scheduling project that could benefit from an Agile approach.

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