Agile Is About More than Projects

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  

Some organizations have embraced agile for everything they do, though these environments are still the minority. For most organizations, agile is viewed as an approach limited to a small subset of the work they carry out. While agile may have expanded beyond software development, it’s not yet mainstream and it’s largely restricted to certain types of projects. There also remain a number of organizations that don’t use agile at all. They don’t see a need for it, they don’t feel ready, or some other combination of factors have led them to stick to more traditional work approaches.

Regardless of how important agile is or isn't to these organizations, there is an overwhelming sense that agile is an approach to work that is exclusive to projects. It isn’t.

Yes, agile was born in software development where each piece of work stands alone as a project, and I frequently write about agile, waterfall and hybrid project delivery approaches. But these days agile is so much more than that. The success of agile techniques in project delivery has led to the same concepts being applied in other areas of business: planning, portfolio management, etc. The integration of agile development with DevOps concepts is leading to an evolution from projects to continuous delivery. In today’s competitive and fast-moving world, agile is a catalyst for …

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