The Paradox of Agile PM and Virtual Teams

Dr. Rico has been a leader in support of major U.S. government agencies for 25 years. He's led many Cloud, Lean, Agile, SOA, Web Services, Six Sigma, FOSS, ISO 9001, CMMI and SW-CMM projects. He specializes in IT investment analysis, portfolio valuation and organizational change. He's been an international keynote speaker, presented at leading conferences, written six textbooks and published numerous articles. He’s also a frequent PMI, APLN, INCOSE, SPIN and conference speaker. For more see davidfrico.com.

  Agile   Communications Management   CRM   Governance   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management   Teams  

How is agile project management performed in the context of virtual teams? Can agile project management be used in conjunction with virtual teams? Isn’t this an oxymoron? Aren’t they incompatible? If they are compatible, what are the principles, practices, tools and techniques for applying agile project management to virtual teams?

This is a controversy that’s been raging for at least a decade (i.e., the application of agile project management and virtual teams). There are no simple answers. In fact, this is a quandary that predates the advent of formalized models of agile project management. It often manifests itself in the form of controversies surrounding outsourcing in general. Sometimes, it manifests itself in the form of the debate surrounding the use of multinational, global, international and transnational business partnerships, alliances and other relationships. It goes by many names, such as distributed teams, global teams and even offshoring. However, the latter are a special case of virtual teams, so let’s just focus on the basics.

Agile project management is a contemporary approach or model of project management. It is a relatively new paradigm for managing high-risk, time-sensitive and research and development-oriented new product and service-oriented development projects. That is, it’s an approach for initiating, planning,…

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