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Agile Management: An Oxymoron?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Many of you will be familiar with agile software development approaches--the concept of a number of short, iterative processes in order to get to the ultimate goal of a finished product. It’s an interesting model that has been very successful in some areas, and that inevitably means that it results in a number of spinoff disciplines, including agile management.
If you type “agile management” into a search engine, you will find some very interesting results. You’ll come across terms that you never thought that you would have to deal with in project management--the concept of the “Scrum Master” for example, and maybe more worryingly, chickens and pigs.
I kid you not! Could I really make this stuff up?
Chickens, pigs…really?
So a brief overview before we go too far. In agile management one of the most common approaches is called Scrum. In Scrum terms, you are the master--it’s the PM equivalent in this particular agile world. Pigs and chickens are references to the old joke about bacon and eggs for breakfast, where the chicken is involved in producing the breakfast, but the pig is committed!
I’m not going to focus solely on scrum here, but the terms are fairly memorable, so it’s a good place to start. Pigs are the people who are committed to your project--the project team is the most …
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