As a project manager of many years experience, working both pan sector and discipline, whilst using many different flavours of methodology I have to admit that I am still struggling to position the “Agile” movement in terms of delivering projects.
Coming from a manufacturing background I have exposure to Lean (make to stock) and Agile (make to order) and TOC[1] in terms of delivering products. As I remember it, these were always positioned as “philosophies” which an organisation could choose to embrace.
Having made their choice to follow a certain path, they then embarked on a top-down implementation of that philosophy, part of which was choosing and implementing methods or tools. Failure to embrace the philosophy would ultimately undermine the whole initiative and lead to a “bastardized” or “cherry picked” solution which “worked” (hopefully) for the organisation.
Moving forward into my years in Professional Services I began delivering Projects, using a wide range of methods and tools. My employing organisation had a methodology for project delivery, which changed and evolved over the years as our knowledge base increased; that base accounted for not only our own learning, but those of the wider project management community. We were not fussy – best practice worked for us and we would happily take from PMBoK, Prince or whatever came along that could increase our capability to deliver successful projects and programmes. Working with external clients and third-party suppliers we also had to be flexible as they often had their own project methodology into which we had to dovetail in order to ensure good relationships and a successful delivery. The key elements of our approach were…
The rest of this article is available from the October edition of our monthly project management & recruitment issues newsletter, Project Management Tipoffs. The issue’s main theme tackled agile project management, so give the article and the remainder of our issue a look for some insight on what has to date been a rather confusing subject! To get Project Management Tipoffs, be sure to subscribe – it’ll land in your inbox on the third Thursday of each month!
