For the right types of projects, deploying Agile project management development techniques will give significant (up to 30%) reductions in cost and time, and improvement in quality.
To deploy it with safety requires a different, and in some ways more sophisticated, application of project management disciplines.
Why is it worthwhile?
Project management is a risk management vehicle. If an entity is to be managed, it must be measured, and the measurement compared with expectations. To act otherwise requires management to underwrite speculative developments which many senior managers will find unacceptable.
What will you experience
Implementations of Agile are many and varied, and the initial step is to establish the principle methods and mechanisms that have been adopted.
There follows a negotiation involving Agile practitioners and management which allows management to effectively measure and apply control to Agile development while not constraining the methods to the extent that the undoubted advantages they bring are lost.
How you might start
When a candidate for using Agile is identified, the PMO should establish the appropriate project strategy to cope with the different needs of this product development life cycle.
Our approach to implementing Agile project management methods would typically involve the use of the following tools and models:
Where the PMO or development shop has little history with the use of these methods, it is sensible to invest in acquiring measurement and logging tools and techniques to cope with the lack of a plan or schedule to monitor progress and testing cycles against. This is where CITI most often starts – developing ways of assuring that the technical teams are tracking towards project rather than technical objectives.
