Agile Collaboration

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.

  Agile   Risk Management  

I’ve had a number of conversations with project managers who have been frustrated by their attempts to implement an agile approach to project management. They have found that the expected benefits didn’t materialize and that the projects were subjected to just as many delays as traditional project management approaches--but with less ability to absorb those delays. Generally, the experiment had been a dismal failure.

So what’s going on here? Is agile project management just a bad idea? An agile approach to executing a project can be extremely successful and can deliver benefits to customers, team members and the organization as a whole--but it needs to be conducted in the right environment, otherwise it can be a recipe for disaster.

The Problem
I don’t intend to turn this article into Agile 101, but an understanding of the basics is necessary. Projects executed in accordance with agile principles will have a series of distinct deliverable packages every week or two, and the contents of those packages will be somewhat dynamic. In theory, this will lead to faster delivery of the overall solution, as well as a solution that better meets the client’s needs because it can be adapted much more readily and in practice it can work very well.

The problem is that this approach can’t happen within a vacuum. It’s not enough to have…

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