Project Management

Applying Agile to Emergent Projects

Mass Bay Chapter

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

Most of us work on projects where we know the end date or the budget--or both. But there is a category of projects where we might not know either: emergent projects. Emergent projects are change projects such as your agile transition or any other project that you have no control over, such as a job search.

Can you apply agile to those projects? Yes. Carefully.

How Do You Manage Without an End Date?
I bet some of you are puzzled. How can you possibly manage a project without an end date? Well, as much as you might like an end date for a change project, you can’t make people change by a certain date. You can help. You can provide training. You can facilitate meetings. You can talk until you are blue in the face. But you can’t make people change any faster than they can.

This is one of the characteristics of an emergent project. You can assist people to the end, but you can’t help them over the finish line. You can only make it easy for them to cross that line.

It’s the same problem with a job search. You can’t make anyone offer you a job. (Wouldn't that be nice?) You can create a system for yourself so you can see how you are doing, But you can’t say “This search is over” until you actually have a job offer in hand.

Create Success Criteria
One thing you can do is to create success criteria. If you know…


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