Being agile and quick in business is vital as the pace of change accelerates persistently and agile project management is taking the lead.
Could "Agile" be the best method to choose for project management?
This has been an ongoing debate for years. Essentially there are 3 groups of project managers;
Traditional Project Managers- Generally, they use waterfall methodology and frequently refer to the PMBOK (i:e- Project Management Body of Knowledge). They follow the best practices, models, and templates for effective project management.
Agile Project Managers- They’re quite different from their traditional counterparts. They focus on the team and consider success to be team driven.
Then there are Traditional Project Managers who want to play in Agile Environments, so they start looking for specific tools and techniques that they can “borrow” from the agile approaches. Often these folks take more of a hybrid approach to project management and agile approaches have become their mainstream.
Cutting to the chase
I don’t think you can be “agile” by approaching your projects with the same tactics you’ve always used for traditional or waterfall projects!
Agile is a jargon that has been zooming around the business world for nearly 15 years. Managers want to be quick, alive, and agile to all possibilities when it’s about driving their business forward, especially in this increased competition period.
Project managers (PMs) each year face challenges to bring projects through to a successful completion. The year 2015 will be no different from in years past as far as this is concerned. Trends for this year within this field will include a continuation of some of the same tools popular in 2014, but with a bit more emphasis on other tools and innovations. Project managers as usual will need to be flexible enough to embrace these trends where necessary to improve their success rate. We provide you with some of the trends we see being important in the following information.
Project management is all about taking an idea, a future product or a future service and turning into the product or service it was planned to be.
How can you do this?
You can do this by using various skills such as leadership, communication, planning skills, time management, risk assessment and negotiation skills. You have to take the idea, the project, and make sure you negotiate the terms of delivery very thoroughly, so unexpected requirements won’t appear along the way.
Then, you need to be able to evaluate it in terms of time and resources. If you are a project manager in the IT industry, you will have to be able to reach an affirmation like this: ‘To be able to deliver this project I will need 6 developers, two quality analysts, one business analyst. They will work on roughly 400 tasks which will be done during 24 sprints.’
Also, a very important aspect of project management is the ability to predict risks, bottlenecks, and, last, but not least, motivate the entire team in order to deliver the project in a timely manner.
If you are already working as a project manager, at least once during your career, you might’ve reached a moment when you thought you need to take your project management strategy to the next level.
During this article, we’ll go through aspects that might help you get over this resistance in your career and turn the situation into a support for the development of your career.
