The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile

Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

Charles G. Cobb

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118991763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Streamline project workflow with expert agile implementation

The Project Management Profession is beginning to go through rapid and profound transformation due to the widespread adoption of agile methodologies. Those changes are likely to dramatically change the role of project managers in many environments as we have known them and raise the bar for the entire project management profession; however, we are in the early stages of that transformation and there is a lot of confusion about the impact it has on project managers:

• There are many stereotypes and misconceptions that exist about both Agile and traditional plan-driven project management,
• Agile and traditional project management principles and practices are treated as separate and independent domains of knowledge with little or no integration between the two and sometimes seen as in conflict with each other
• Agile and "Waterfall" are thought of as two binary, mutually-exclusive choices and companies sometimes try to force-fit their business and projects to one of those extremes when the right solution is to fit the approach to the project

It's no wonder that many Project Managers might be confused by all of this! This book will help project managers unravel a lot of the confusion that exists; develop a totally new perspective to see Agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices in a new light as complementary to each other rather than competitive; and learn to develop an adaptive approach to blend those principles and practices together in the right proportions to fit any situation.

There are many books on Agile and many books on traditional project management but what's very unique about this book is that it takes an objective approach to help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of both of those areas to see how they can work synergistically to improve project outcomes in any project. The book includes discussion topics, real world case studies, and sample enterprise-level agile frameworks that facilitate hands-on learning as well as an in-depth discussion of the principles behind both Agile and traditional plan-driven project management practices to provide a more thorough level of understanding.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Agile Project Management

OVER THE PAST 10 TO 15 YEARS, there has been a rapid and dramatic adoption of agile methodologies:

1. Project Management Institute (PMI)® studies concluded that from 2008 to 2013, the use of agile practices tripled.¹
2. According to a 2013 survey conducted by VersionOne:²
   • 88% of the respondents say that their organizations are practicing agile development, up from 84% in 2012 and 80% in 2011.
   • Over half of the respondents (52%) are using agile software to manage the majority of their projects.
   • 88% say that they are at least “knowledgeable” about agile software development techniques, up 7% from the previous year.
3. This trend has been going on for some time. As early as 2007, a Forrester survey reported:³
   • “26% are already using agile and an additional 42% are aware.”
   • “Adoption of agile increased 56% from 17% in 2006, to 26% in 2007.”
   • “Awareness increased 45% from 29% in 2006, to 42% in 2007.”

These statistics indicate that agile is not a fad, it is having a significant impact on the way projects are managed, and it's definitely here to stay. This trend has a significant impact on the career direction of project managers who have come from a traditional, plan-driven project management background since there is no formal role for a project manager at the team level in an agile project.

The Chasm in Project Management Philosophies

In spite of this rapid and sustained proliferation of agile, there is still a fairly large chasm between the agile and traditional project management communities:

• There has been only a limited amount of progress on developing a more integrated approach to project management that embraces both agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices.
• Many people seem to see agile and project management principles and practices as competitive approaches that are in conflict with each other, and they are essentially treated as two separate and independent domains of knowledge.
• Considerable polarization between these two communities is based in some part on myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions about what agile and project management is.

A major goal of this book is to help project managers understand the impact of agile on the project management profession and to broaden and expand their project management skills as needed to develop a more integrated approach to adapt to this new environment.

This isn't just a matter of getting another certification—it can require a major shift in thinking for many traditional project managers that will take time and experience to develop. PMI has created a new PMI-ACP® (Agile Certified Practitioner) certification, which has been very successful and is a great step in the right direction—but it doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. It doesn't test whether a project manager knows how to blend agile and traditional project management principles and practices in the right proportions to fit a given situation, and that is the real challenge that many project managers face.

A lot of the polarization that exists between the agile and traditional project management communities is rooted in some well-established stereotypes of what a project manager is that are based on how typical projects have been managed in the past. The role of a project manager has been so strongly associated with someone who plans and manages projects using traditional, plan-driven project management approaches that many people can't conceive of any other image of a project manager. It's time to develop a new vision of what an agile project manager is that goes beyond all of those traditional stereotypes and fully integrates agile within the overall portfolio of project management principles and practices.

It feels very similar to an evolution that took place when I worked in the quality management profession in the early 1990s. Up until that time, the primary emphasis in quality management had been on quality control, and inspection, and the image of a quality manager was heavily based on that role:

• The predominant quality management approach was based on final inspection of products prior to shipping them to the customer and rejecting any that didn't meet quality standards. It's easy to see how that approach was inefficient, because it resulted in a lot of unnecessary rework to correct problems after the fact, and it also wasn't that effective because any inspection approach is based on sampling, and it is impractical to do a 100% sample. For that reason, it can result in mediocre quality.
• A far better approach was to go upstream in the process and eliminate defects at the source by designing the process to be inherently more reliable and free of defects and build quality into the inherent design of the products. That didn't mean that the prior emphasis on quality control and inspection was obsolete and eliminated; it was just not the only way to manage quality and wasn't the most effective approach in all situations.

That was a gut-wrenching change for many in the quality management profession—instead of being in control of quality and being the gatekeeper with the inspection process, a good quality manager needed to become more of a coach and a consultant to influence others to build quality into the way they did their work. This changed the nature of the work dramatically for many in the quality management profession and eliminated a number of traditional quality management roles that were based on the old quality control and inspection approach. The similarity to the changes going on in the project management profession should be apparent:

• To be successful in more uncertain environments, project managers need to be able to take an adaptive approach that is appropriate to the level of uncertainty in the project and integrate quality into the process rather than relying on final acceptance testing at the end of the project to validate the product that is being produced.
• They also need to give up some of the control that has become associated with the project management profession—in some cases, they may need to become more of a coach and a consultant to influence others rather than being in absolute control of a project.

This can dramatically change the role of a project manager. In some situations, the role of a project manager as we've known it may no longer exist. For example, at a team level in an agile project, you probably won't find anyone with a title of project manager because the project management functions have been absorbed into other roles and are done very differently. That doesn't mean that project management is no longer important, but it may cause us to dramatically rethink what project management is in a much broader context than the way we might have thought about it in the past.

The Evolution of Agile and Waterfall

You will often hear people make a comparison between agile and waterfall. Many of those discussions are polarized and position them as competitive approaches. Here's an example:⁴

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According to the 2012 CHAOS report, Agile succeeds three times more often than Waterfall. Because the use of Agile methodologies helps companies work more efficiently and deliver winning results, Agile adoption is constantly increasing.

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While that statement is generally true, it's an oversimplification. There are at least two problems with that kind of statement:a

1. It makes it sound like there are only two binary, mutually exclusive choices, agile and waterfall.
2. The meaning of the words agile and waterfall are typically not well-defined and are used very loosely.

For those reasons, I prefer to avoid comparing agile to waterfall because it tends to be a very polarized disc...