What is Agile Project Management?

Managing projects is an art. It needs creativity, imagination and street smartness to be able to make projects move towards success.

The traditional project management, referred to as the waterfall model emphasizes on planning and bets all its dollars on it to be a success. This approach, time and again has failed to open doors towards successful delivery.

In agile project management, although there is the planning piece, all the bets are not hedged on it. There is a fair bit of common sense that goes with the entire planning and execution phases.

To me, agile project management is all about common sense. None of us are soothsayers. We cannot predict what is going to happen six months from now. So the extensive planning done for the next few months and years in traditional project management is always set for failure. In agile, we plan only for a few weeks at a time – say anytime between two and four weeks.

Agile project management changed the perspective of managing projects from being scope centric to customer centric (or product centric). The scope of the project did not act as a deterrent to what could go in or out, but rather the customer was given the reins to dictate the scope as and when needed. This changed the perspective from a project management that was rigid around the scope to the agility that we have today.

Also, the complexity of the products got broken down into simple pieces that could be controlled, well understood and shaped as per the changing needs of the business. So, in other words, complex architectures and monoliths became a thing of the past, and new microservice architectures took shape.

Agile project management is here to stay for now. It is the present and the future at least for the next few years. Most organizations have already moved onto the Agile pastures and the Agile project management has become the norm.