Understanding Agile Project Management – Episode 101

Many organizations are pursuing various agility initiatives to improve their delivery capability. In line with those trends, the concept of “Agile Project Management” has also taken root in the industry as a strategy to pursue organizational excellence. This podcast episode reviews the concept of Agile project management and contrasts it with traditional project management.

What is Agile Project Management?

In this podcast we will review the concepts of Agile Project Management and how it’s different from traditional Project Management. Agile project management is about managing project delivery in an agile world. As agility practices differ from traditional modes of delivery, an organization’s PM culture requires a transition from the traditional waterfall approach of managing projects to the agile mode of working.

Most organizations now have adopted some form of agile practices. This includes adopting agile software development methodologies such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, Crystal, and others. In other cases, many organizations are also adopting agile practices external to IT and on the business side of the organization. So, although the maturity of organizations in the use of agile practices varies greatly from one organization to another, the challenge for those who have taken the plunge in the agile world, usually has to do with transitioning from the traditional ways of thinking and doing to the new paradigm. This sometimes is easier said than done because the transition involves an uphill journey not just in terms of adopting new agile related processes and practices but also due to a cultural and mindset shift from the traditional ways of doing things. The transition also involves redefining a number of roles and responsibilities and training staff in those roles.

In the remaining podcast, we will look at three questions. What are the characteristics of Agile Projects that make them different from traditional approaches? What is the role of the “Agile Project Manager”? And finally, are traditional methodologies such as PMBOK still relevant in the new agile world.

So, let’s get started.

Characteristics of Agile

To understand agile project management, we should first revisit some of the principles that makes agile different than the waterfall approach. This is important to understand because the Agile Project Manager needs to ensure that the project that’s supposedly done in an agile manner is delivering up to its promise. This in fact is one of the most important responsibilities of the new Agile PM.

So, agility (in product development) is about the following:

Agility is about iterative development – Rather than focusing to tackle a large scope, agility calls for smaller and iterative development.
Agility is about speedy and accelerated delivery – The iterative mode of developing products that have a much smaller and defined scope results in a faster delivery cycle to the market.
Agility is about embracing constant changes – Agile is about expecting and embracing change even when the change is introduced toward the end of development lifecycles of certain iterations. A PM, therefore, should constantly have a mechanism to expect change, to embrace it, and to ensure that changes and any potential impact of change are communicated to all stakeholders and parties.
Being Agile is about working in Cross functional teams – The waterfall approach involves teams separated by silos of specialty. Agile method of development, on the other hand, involves cross functional teams working in concert with each other to develop products and services. This model where all team members are working together not only removes delays from decision making and problem solving but also increases productivity of all team members.
Agility is about responding rapidly to feedback – As the agile team is focused on delivering products and services frequently and quickly, it’s also important to take the feedback received from stakeholders and customers and incorporate that feedback in the next iteration of product development.
Agile is about Business and IT alignment – This is one of the most important aspects of certain agile practices. In the Scrum methodology for example, a product owner represents the business community and is also an active member of the Agile / Scrum team helping in defining functionality that needs to be developed, prioritizing what needs to get built first, and so on. This mode of working therefore increases alignment between Business and IT.

So, these were just some of the important characteristics of Agility.

One of the drivers to transition to an agile model is to maximize business value. You may have observed when we reviewed characteristics of agile that the business value comes in many shapes and forms such as speedy development and delivery, adjusting to constant change, maximizing the productivity of team members, and most importantly delivering products that are aligned to business requirements.

So, one of the main points that needs emphasis here is that the agile project manager’s primary task is to ensure that not only the business value is constantly being delivered to the stakeholders and customers but also that the value is constantly being communicated to all parties.

The Role of the Agile PM

Next, let’s contrast the traditional PM role with the Agile PM.

One of the important things to note is that the role of the Agile PM is different from the one managing traditional waterfall projects. That’s because in the regular waterfall method, the PM is responsible for functions such as assigning tasks (even if that’s at a granular level), controlling scope and schedule, negotiating scope that will be in the project, prioritizing tasks based on the scope, helping the team by removing their hurdles, and other such functions.

Within the agile world, however, matters are different because of the additional roles that take on some of the responsibilities of the traditional Project Manager. For example, let’s review those roles in the case of Scrum, which is one of the many Agile methodologies being used today.

Product Owner – Scrum defines the role of a product owner as the one who is the POC for the business and works with the business to define the scope in a backlog and prioritizes the backlog. A Product owner takes on the leadership role of working with the business. So, when looked at it from that viewpoint, the role of the product owner is similar to that of the traditional PM.
Scrum Master – The Scrum Master is the primary facilitator for the project and is responsible for removing project hurdles for the team, empowers the team to focus on delivering the agreed upon functionality from the backlog, holds daily short meetings to ensure that the team shares its progress with each other, and so on. When we look at this role from this perspective, the role of the Scrum Master seems to closely resemble that of the traditional PM.
Scrum teams – The Scrum teams are responsible to deliver the agreed upon functionality from the prioritized backlog. To do so however, they are empowered to work as they see fit. So, they work together by dividing the tasks themselves, planning work related to iterations, and assigning those tasks to the team members.

An important thing to note is that in the case of the Scrum Agile approach, there is no formal role of a PROJECT MANAGER. Still, in many organizations the traditional PMs have taken the role of a Scrum Master and they seem to carry out the role of the Agile PM. They assume that role as a token of their responsibility of “removing all hurdles for the team’s path to help them get their job done”.

Some of the other responsibilities that an Agile PM takes on includes the following. This is not an exhaustive list but is meant to give you a flavor of how traditional PMs fit in the new world of agile.

An Agile PM keep his or her eyes on the overall Agile framework and ensures that there are no hurdles in Agile adoption from an overall process standpoint. If the PM detects any exceptions, those are highlighted and worked by the PM to make it easier for the teams to function in the new paradigm.
An Agile PM develops and reports metrics that are aligned to agile way of doing work. This metrics includes but is not limited to measuring velocity, burndown, and so on. These are the terms that are used in the Agile world to measure project progress.
An Agile PM also institutes and reinforces the agile practices depending on the methodology that is selected for the project. So, for example, this requires developing storyboards, tracking and monitoring burndown charts, etc.
The Agile PM is also required to provide the right management dashboards to all the stakeholders when reporting project progress.
Another key challenge that an Agile PM needs to address as part of his or her job is to be the bridge between the new agile teams and the rest of the organization. For example, many stakeholders in organizations are sometimes unable to understand the reporting that comes from their agile teams. They, for example, are unable to understand terms such as AGILE STORY POINTS, LENGTH OF VARIOUS SPRINTS, BUDGET FOR ITERATIONS, BACKLOGS, VELOCITY, BURNDOWN CHARTS, RELEASE TRAINS, and so on. An Agile PM therefore should bridge that gap by communicating the progress in a way so that the rest of the organization can understand (e.g. progress, schedule, risk, costs, etc.). He or she should also help the other stakeholders come up to speed in understanding Agile.

Is PMBOK still relevant?

Now we move to the next important question, which is whether the traditional PM methodologies such as PMBOK are still relevant in the agile world. If you recall, PMBOK is PMI’s methodology for managing projects and it includes the core 47 PM processes distributed across 10 knowledge areas and 5 process groups. So, the short answer to that question is YES – PMBOK is still relevant in the agile world. However, the way the PMBOK processes are carried out is a bit different in the agile world. Before we look at that, a note of caution. This specific guidance is not part of PMBOK. PMBOK as of the 5^th edition doesn’t address agile specifically. But we can expect to see references to agile in future versions.

Getting back to the relevance of PMBOK to the agile world. Let’s take an example of the PMBOK knowledge area called “Project Risk Management”. Within the agile and Scrum approach, risks are discussed daily and it’s the Scrum Master’s task to remove those hurdles from the project. So, while the concept is still the same, it’s treated and handled a bit differently. The same is true for PMBOK processes that fall under the knowledge area of “Project Communications Management”. Following the agile approaches don’t do away the need for communications. But the way it’s carried out changes due to the nature of the agile methodologies such as the pace of delivery and staff’s modified roles and responsibilities. Let’s take a look at one more example. The “Plan Time Management” knowledge area within PMBOK deals with defining activities, sequencing activities, developing schedules, etc. Within agile, this would relate to working with the product manager to prioritize the product backlog and schedule those items as part of releases and so on.

So, in conclusion we can say that a PM who has managed projects in the traditional way using PMBOK methodology for example, doesn’t have to forget those principles. In fact those principles and the knowledge learned from implementing those processes can come in very handy when defining the tailored agile methodology under the new paradigm. In fact, if done correctly, an organization can get the best of both worlds from its Agile Project Management – i.e. knowledge from a comprehensive methodology is applied in the context of agile practices of the day.

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