Is the Project World Becoming More Agile?

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   Requirements Management   Scope Management   Strategy  

It has been fascinating to watch organizations adapt to agile in recent years. They have gone from rejection or grudging acceptance within very limited software development areas, to now fully integrating agile as an at least equal partner with waterfall approaches at an enterprise level.

And all of that has happened in a relatively short period of time, certainly compared with the rate of evolution we saw in traditional project execution environments prior to agile. Now we are seeing organizations looking for ways to increase their institutional flexibility and adaptability—“small ‘a’ agile,” if you will, and that is creating even more opportunities to embrace agile principles

The increasing speed of strategic change--and its impact
Organizations are facing a world where the traditional approach of setting a long-term strategy with annual interim goals simply doesn’t work anymore. The speed of technological change, increasingly global competition and the erosion of margins in virtually all industries has resulted in a need for strategies to evolve much more frequently, and for goals and objectives to be constantly evolving.

This drives frequent change into corporate portfolios, resulting in shifts in project constraints, diversion of investments into new projects and the cancellation of a number of projects that were originally …

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