Agile stands for the ability to move quickly, easily, and gracefully.

If you are in tech (these days, who is not?), you must have come across the phrase agile software development (ASD), which is the iterative & incremental development of software.

Agile project management (APM) is extending the concepts of agile software development to how projects are managed in the tech industry & beyond. With agile project management methodology, you develop the projects in bits & pieces i.e., smaller segments or milestones. These segments can be developed & shipped to the market quickly to test the waters.

Basically, in agile project management (APM), a large project is broken down into multiple independent baby projects. These baby projects are then further split into milestones. The concept is to reduce the larger/mega project to a set of smaller ones that can be pursued in parallel to speed up the time to market.

Agile way of developing products enables you to

• deliver value at the earliest i.e., speed up development & deployment
• gather customer feedback i.e., avoid building disaster products
• loop in the feedback into your project requirements i.e., ensure product-market fit
• readjust the plan if needed i.e., respond to the volatility with certainty, and
• repeat the process iteratively & incrementally.

These baby components of the project later stack & gel with each other to build the larger application, to deliver a more beefy solution.

HOW agile project management (APM) works?

It depends.

There are multiple agile project management methodologies -

• Scrum
• Kanban
• XP (Extreme programming),
• Scrumban,
• LSD (Lean software development),
• APF (adaptive project framework),
• FDD (feature-driven development), and
• Hybrid of agile & waterfall approach.

Scrum & Kanban are the most prominent agile project management methodologies.

The APM workflow varies from one APM method to the other. But to answer “how agile project management works?”, we can enlist the high-level process in 5 stages. Unlike linear project management methodologies like the waterfall model, agile project management stages, once initiated, are active in parallel to each other as if working in a closed circular loop. We shall explain the agile project management stages in detail-

Foundation

Be it a mega construction project or a software development project, foundations matter. When APM is adopted for work, the first stage involves envisioning the customer needs, business proposition, high-level product features, the project team, and all other stakeholders.

Estimation

The next stage in agile project management, post foundations, is to

• Individually detail the product features,
• Segment the product features in groups in a way that simplifies & optimizes the overall product development process.
• Set time, financial budget, and human resources estimates. And allocate them to each of the product features.
• You also decide on which APM method you will be adopting — for software projects, it is mostly either Scrum or Kanban.
• Basically, in the APM lingo — this stage is all about defining Stories & Backlogs, Sprints & Cadence, Ceremonies & Scrums.

Execution

Task boards , burndown charts , and stand-up meetings are quite a buzz at this stage. The third base in an agile project management process is all about high-voltage action & collaboration among different teams. Project stakeholders meet regularly in line with the pre-decided scrum-meeting cadence to check on the sprint progress, stories (backlog) delivered, and wins & challenges (if any). Teams also continuously estimate time & budget based on new developments that might not have been discovered in the initial stages.

Incremental Iteration

As mentioned earlier, agile project management is not about linear progression. It’s more of a continuous, circular, in-loop execution. When the features get developed, they are immediately released to the market. Teams listen to the incoming end-user feedback and suggestions from the stakeholders. Accordingly, team members, project requirements, estimates, budgets, sprints & velocity, cadence, and scrums are continuously planned to optimize the response to new trends.

Closure

Finally, once the project is complete, it is shipped and deployed for all the users. But this is not a done & dusted stage. Maintenance & new feature requests always keep coming. If the changes are too extreme, you can kick start another child agile project within the ongoing parent project.

This pretty much sums up the overall agile project management process. Now, for a better understanding of APM, let’s look at how APM differs from the Waterfall model.

APM vs Waterfall project management

Waterfall is old school. And old school doesn’t mean inefficient or ineffective. It is good. But the question to consider is whether Waterfall is good enough against APM. Would the Waterfall model of development yield better digital solutions than APM?

The agile manifesto underpins 4 values of Agile project management (APM). These are real-critical to understand before we do a nose-to-nose comparison of waterfall vs APM.

Here are those four Agile values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

These core values of Agile Project Management are the core differentiators of an APM based project & a Waterfall model project. Let’s dive deeper.

Who’s in the driving seat — APM vs Waterfall

Scope holds the project’s steering in the Waterfall model of software development,

Resources for Agile i.e., in agile projects, resources sit in the driving seat, and stakeholders too. Agile is more about delivering products in successive cycles

Compatibility with requirements — APM vs Waterfall

Waterfall model is best suited for a project when you are certain that the defined requirements for the project are final and not subject to change in the near future. Basically, stable environments have high compatibility with the Waterfall model of software development. Agile project management (APM) is good for evolving requirements and environments. It provides the team enough flexibility to swiftly course-correct & adapt to the new requirements/environments.

Dine & wine together? — APM vs Waterfall

In the Waterfall Model, the team working on the same project is distributed as requirements are well-defined, so are milestones, deliverables, and dependencies. So, Waterfall teams can work in cohorts without the need for continuous inter-team collaboration. In agile project management, the team is shooting a moving target , they need continuous collaboration & feedback. So, APM teams are often co-located, and multi-functional, and they collaborate a lot.

The ROI climax — APM vs Waterfall

In Waterfall projects, stakeholders have to wait until the climax to see the magic of the product & its reflection in the account books. For Agile projects, teams use CI/CD i.e., continuous release of viable features and so teams can assess the ROI of the product right in its infancy.

Pitfalls — APM vs Waterfall

The biggest pitfall for Waterfall is no show for money until the product tastes the water. Another major headache in the Waterfall project could be The Scope Creep i.e. if new changes kick in a live project, it may disrupt the flow. In agile project management, evolving scope management sometimes cripples the project speed becomes a nightmare for stakeholders and burdens the team with the extra responsibility of backlog prioritization & management.

Summing it up!

Freedom, flexibility, adaptability, efficiency, quicker bug fixes, and continuous user-generated validation are the fruits that Agile project management bears. But like how light has darkness, any melody has noise — APM too has a few tradeoffs. It is not suited for distributed teams and may face a lot of cultural barriers during project execution if there is no buy-in from all the stakeholders.

ONES Testcase, ONES Wiki, and ONES Project have been designed keeping all these factors in mind to help teams ship better & faster products. Try it.

Originally published at https://blog.ones.com on December 19, 2022.