Shine An Agile Light

Garry L. Booker, PMP, CSM, is a contract project manager and Agile Lead. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Agile   Communications Management   Stakeholder Management   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)   ProjectsAtWork  

The Agile movement, which emerged from a need to rethink software development projects, has popularized a number of ideas that should be applied more broadly across the PM community. Many Agile principles complement “formal” methods such as earned value management, and can be readily implemented in traditional project environments.

Agile software projects benefit from incremental planning and frequent delivery of potentially shippable results. These benefits don’t apply to all projects, but slicing any project into short iterations is still a great idea. My current project is a nice example. I'm managing a project to purchase and modify two very large aircraft. It’s not a software development project, and there is nothing “potentially shippable” about our aircraft at the end of each two-week iteration. Also, there really is no need for iterative planning because the entire scope of the project has been known since the start of the project.

Nevertheless, we decided to slice this project into biweekly iterations, as many Agile projects do. Why? For a traditional project like this, what’s the value of organizing the project into short iterations? That’s easy: There is great benefit in shining a light, in frequent intervals, on the progress we are making (and not making). Every two weeks, we hold a very brief status meeting for the …

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