In recent years, there has been a lot of buzz about different agile project management methods being used by different organizations. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, a lot of businesses have moved, or are moving to the agile principles in their software development methodology. Secondly, there have been a lot of new agile project management tools being launched by both existing and new software development companies.
Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle
Iterative or agile life cycles are composed of several iterations or incremental steps towards the completion of a project. Iterative approaches are frequently used in software development projects to promote velocity and adaptability since the benefit of iteration is that you can adjust as you go along rather than following a linear path. One of the aims of an agile or iterative approach is to release benefits throughout the process rather than only at the end. At the core, agile projects should exhibit central values and behaviors of trust, flexibility, empowerment, and collaboration.
What are the 6 steps in the Agile methodology?
The goal of Agile is to produce shorter development cycles and more frequent product releases than traditional waterfall project management. This shorter time frame enables project teams to react to changes in the client’s needs more effectively.
As we said before, you can use a few different Agile frameworks—Scrum and Kanban are two of the most common. But each Agile methodology will follow the same basic process, which includes:
1. Project planning
Like with any project, before beginning your team should understand the end goal, the value to the organization or client, and how it will be achieved.
You can develop a project scope here, but remember that the purpose of using Agile project management is to be able to address changes and additions to the project easily, so the project scope shouldn’t be seen as unchangeable.
2. Product roadmap creation
A roadmap is a breakdown of the features that will make up the final product. This is a crucial component of the planning stage of Agile, because your team will build these individual features during each sprint.
At this point, you will also develop a product backlog, which is a list of all the features and deliverables that will make up the final product. When you plan sprints later on, your team will pull tasks from this backlog.
3. Release planning
In traditional waterfall project management, there is one implementation date that comes after an entire project has been developed. When using Agile, however, your project uses shorter development cycles (called sprints) with features released at the end of each cycle.
Before kicking off the project, you’ll make a high-level plan for feature releases and at the beginning of each sprint, you’ll revisit and reassess the release plan for that feature.
4. Sprint planning
Before each sprint begins, the stakeholders need to hold a sprint planning meeting to determine what will be accomplished by each person during that sprint, how it will be achieved, and assess the task load. It’s important to share the load evenly among team members so they can accomplish their assigned tasks during the sprint.
You’ll also need to visually document your workflow for team transparency, shared understanding within the team, and identifying and removing bottlenecks.
5. Daily stand-ups
To help your team accomplish their tasks during each sprint and assess whether any changes need to be made, hold short daily stand-up meetings. During these meetings, each team member will briefly talk about what they accomplished the day before and what they will be working on that day.
These daily meetings should be only 15 minutes long. They aren’t meant to be extended problem-solving sessions or a chance to talk about general news items. Some teams will even hold these meetings standing up to keep it brief.
6. Sprint review and retrospective
After the end of each sprint, your team will hold two meetings: first, you will hold a sprint review with the project stakeholders to show them the finished product. This is an important part of keeping open communication with stakeholders. An in-person or video conference meeting allows both groups to build a relationship and discuss product issues that arise.
Second, you will have a sprint retrospective meeting with your stakeholders to discuss what went well during the sprint, what could have been better, whether the task load was too heavy or too light for each member, and what was accomplished during the sprint.
Agile Project Management Philosophy
As opposed to a traditional approach, the Agile project management philosophy has been introduced as an attempt to make software engineering more flexible and efficient. It has quickly become the industry standard for project management. It is estimated that about 95 percent of organizations have adopted Agile in one form or another. At the same time, there’s a lot of work left to make the practice mature.
The history of Agile can be traced back to 1957: At that time Bernie Dimsdale, John von Neumann, Herb Jacobs, and Gerald Weinberg were using incremental development techniques (which are now known as Agile), building software for IBM and Motorola. Although not know how to classify the approach they were practicing, they realized clearly that it was different from Waterfall in many ways.
However, the modern-day Agile approach was officially introduced in 2001, when a group of 17 software development professionals met to discuss alternative project management methodologies. Having a clear vision of the flexible, lightweight, and team-oriented software development approach, they mapped it out in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Aimed at “uncovering better ways of developing software,” the Manifesto clearly specifies the fundamental principles of the new approach:
“Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan.”
Complemented with the Twelve Principles of Agile Software, the philosophy has come to be a universal and efficient new way of managing projects.
Agile methodologies take an iterative approach to software development. Unlike a straightforward linear Waterfall model, Agile projects consist of a number of smaller cycles – Sprints. Each one of them is a project in miniature: it has a backlog and consists of design, implementation, testing, and deployment stages within the pre-defined scope of work.
While these principles give you a good high-level view into the Agile mindset, they’re still a bit vague. That’s why the original Agile founders also released a list of 12 guiding principles for running an Agile project:
- The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months
- Stakeholders and developers must collaborate on a daily basis
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- Face-to-face meetings are deemed the most efficient and effective format for project success
- A final working product is the ultimate measure of progress
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
- Simplicity, maximizing the work not done, is an essential element
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly
If you think of software development today, Agile is a direct response to sky-high user expectations.
Conclusion:
Love it or hate it, there is no avoiding the use of agile methodologies in project management. Establishing a project and keeping it on time and budget is challenging even with traditional project management. With traditional techniques like waterfall and sequential development, projects tend to be late and over budget. Agile on the other hand is a way to implement new project management principles that changes everything on how we think about projects. It brings new project management software such as Jira and Scrum to work as part of “agile framework”