Agility in business is becoming ever-more important as pressures to respond to increasingly demanding customers and to innovate in increasingly turbulent markets grows. When it comes to managing volatile projects in such dynamic environments there are only three options. You can be:
Agile, and focus on responding to and exploiting change to generate business advantage.- Fast, and use traditional change resistant practices in quick cycle times to deliver something that can be baselined and subsequently changed.
- Or Dead, through continuing to use slow, cumbersome, change resistant approaches to project management that will almost certainly fail in the face of today’s dynamic business world.
This agile brief provides an overview of ‘Agile’, however, before we get into the detail let’s look at a few statements relating to the brief’s title, “Why should I – as a project management professional – be looking at Agile?”
- ‘Agile’ is not new, it has been around in different guises since the mid 1980s, gaining prominence in the mid 1990s (the ‘Agile Alliance’ was formed in 2001).
- The majority of the world’s private sector Software Engineering market is now agile or trying to be agile.
- APMG and DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method – one of the first agile frameworks) have implemented an Agile Project Management certification; this is likely to be as big as, or bigger than, their other products, Prince2, MSP, MoR etc.
- The IFG (Institute for Government) is driving implementation of Agile within the UK public sector now (June 2011)
- The PMI (Project Management Institute) is implementing an ‘Agile Project Management’ certification now (June 2011)
…If you want to read the entire article, you can go to the June 2011 edition of Project Management Tipoffs to read the entirety of Agile or Dead. To get a leg up on competitors, subscribe to the Tipoffs newsletter today.
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