Agile Pendentives

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Agile   Estimating   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

A “pendentive” is an architectural converter that lets you fit a domed roof on a square base. The pendentive shown in the image below is the yellow part:

When working in a traditional project management setting, we often need agile pendentives that let us fit agile practices onto a traditional base. They are also useful when discussing concepts with a business that may not be familiar with agile terms. Here are some examples:

Traditional to Agile

1.  WBS –> Prioritized Backlog
When asked to show the work breakdown structure, sponsors and PMO are likely looking for a breakdown of the project deliverables. Traditional project management approaches recommend creating a WBS early in a project lifecycle after gathering requirements and defining scope. 

Agile projects acknowledge this upfront design is likely to change and so deliberately go a little lighter on these definition activities, preferring to invest the time in building portions of application and arriving at agreement of functionality through feedback. 

2.  Detailed Gantt Chart –> Release Plan
Detailed Gantt charts are another example of a detailed upfront design deliverable that is likely to be brittle and changing too frequently to warrant the update effort in project environments that have high levels of requirements …

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