The Trend to Call Agile a Trend

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   Governance  

If you type something like “project management trends” into Google, you will find any number of opinions about what the hot topics are for our discipline. Add “2016” to the search criteria and you will see a slightly narrower list, but it will still be pretty broad.

Undoubtedly, however, agile will be one of the trends that shows up frequently. Replace 2016 with 2015 and you’ll see the same thing. Try 2014 and there won’t be much difference; 2013 will give you similar returns, 2012, well…you get the idea. Agile seems to have been a “trend” for quite some time now, and I for one am fed up with reading about the “trend toward agile.”

Now I guess if we want to get all statistical about it, agile is trending higher in terms of utilization and acceptance. However, project management as a discipline is growing globally, and we don’t call project management a trend. It’s almost as if people think attitudes are changing toward agile and it is suddenly becoming something more than it was before.

That happened—but it was about five years ago now, perhaps longer. Agile is no longer evolving from a niche software development approach to a viable alternative project execution methodology—it has made that evolution and is most definitely part of the mainstream. If your organization thinks that…

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