Is Agile More Successful?

Dr. Blaize Horner Reich is a professor, board director and consultant at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She is on the Academic Member Advisory Group of the Project Management Institute.

  Agile  

Agile methods are a fast-growing area of project management and are often touted as a remedy for issues troubling complex projects. We are three academics and a research organization from Canada. From our academic studies--one from 140 organizations and another consisting of over 1,000 projects--we have discovered some interesting aspects about agile use and project success.

From our survey of over 1,000 projects, we learned that agile practices can be helpful and that increasing the number of agile processes can increase the chance of project success. Some of the wisdom we received about agile has been confirmed: It seems to work better with small teams, moderately experienced teams and when the vision for the final product is not completely clear.

Some of our findings are unexpected. ‎Projects with highly experienced teams or highly engaged stakeholders don't seem to benefit greatly from agile. Environments where stakeholders are not very engaged seem to benefit significantly. Counter to much of what has been written, projects where teams are not collocated can also benefit from agile processes.

Many people don't realize that agile methods are a highly structured way to‎ manage projects. For example, agile defines processes that should happen every single day; most methodologies do not. We have found that …

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