Agile Experience Preferred?

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   Career Development   Leadership  

It’s no surprise that the growth of agile has also resulted in an increase in the number of agile-related job postings—more work means more people. However, I’ve noticed a lot of postings for what appear to be “traditional” project management roles that ask for agile experience, or at least stress a preference for candidates with agile experience. Is this something project managers need to be aware of when considering their career development? I think it is, and in this article I want to look at some of the reasons why.

The easy answer for why this growth is occurring is to suggest organizations are becoming more diverse in their project execution approaches. Many organizations now have a significant percentage of projects delivered using both waterfall and agile methodologies, so they want flexibility in project managers.

There is certainly an element of that, but I don’t see the same trend of job postings for ScrumMasters (or similar) with waterfall experience. There is also undoubtedly a degree of hybrid methodology being implemented—project delivery that has elements of both waterfall and agile within the same methodology. That’s getting closer to what’s going on here—adding agile elements to a waterfall approach—but I still don’t think that’s the full picture.

The evolution of project …

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