What is Agile Project Management?
Agile project management is an approach that centers on iterative development and delivery of a product throughout its lifecycle in increments. Work is split into sizable and manageable chunks, known as sprints, which are completed at intervals over one to six weeks. The agile approach emphasizes active collaboration through customer feedback loops, flexibility to change, continuous improvement in product development, and quick delivery of potentially shippable increments to customers with minimal errors.
Unlike traditional project management methodologies that follow detailed planning, linear execution, and strict adherence to plans with little room for change, agile methodology focuses on an iterative process. In this process, planning, execution, and evaluation occur concurrently. This allows for quick adaptability and frequent updates to align the product with customer needs and market changes.
History of the Agile Manifesto
Traditionally software development was done using the waterfall method, which had 5 sequential stages; requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and deployment. By the 1990s, people were starting to realize that this model doesn't hold well for long-term big-scale projects. In 2001, 17 software practitioners met at a ski lodge in Utah and decided to come up with an alternative way of working—thus agile project management was born. The agile manifesto is a document outlining the agile way of thinking in the form of 12 principles and 4 values that form the bedrock of all the agile frameworks which exist today.
The 12 principles of Agile Project Management
- Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a team is face-to-face conversation.
- Working software is the measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
- The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
The four core values of Agile Project Management
- 01
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
People drive processes, and in turn drive the business. When team communication takes precedence over business processes and tools, it fosters greater trust, making the team more responsive and enabling them to meet customer needs.
- 02
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Agile methodology avoids over-documentation, as this practice has historically bogged down teams and prevented them from spending the necessary time on crafting actual working software. Any documentation should aid team progress and stay up-to-date as the software evolves.
- 03
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
From the agile perspective, the customer is the team's most valued collaborator. Customer input should be considered throughout the entire product lifecycle, not just at the beginning or the end.
- 04
Responding to change over following a plan
The word "agile" implies adapting to and embracing change. Agile project management focuses on release management of a minimum viable product that can be adjusted and evaluated from sprint to sprint.
Why do you need agile project management?
Over the last decade, agile methodology in project management has gained popularity among project managers for running their projects efficiently and delivering value to customers. The concept of agile methodology is known to everyone, but why do you need to be agile in project management? Here are several reasons why you need agile methodology to operate projects successfully.
- Agile methodology focuses on incremental delivery of value to customers, enabling them to use the product sooner and provide constructive feedback for changes. This approach helps deliver an error-free and satisfying final product.
- Continuous feedback from stakeholders allows the project team to iterate and adjust the product faster to align with requirements, resulting in less rework and lower costs.
- Responding and adapting quickly to changing industry dynamics and customer needs results in achieving optimal customer satisfaction and a better position in the market among competitors.
- Agile methodology emphasizes open communication with stakeholders and clients, promoting transparency and clarity for decision-making. This results in timely development and faster releases to the market.
- Delivering in incremental cycles allows teams to detect and respond to potential risks quickly and make informed decisions at the early stages of the project, leading to fewer project failures.
How is agile beneficial?
- Higher customer satisfaction
- High product quality
- Allows for change
- No unpredictable delays
- Team dynamic gets better
The five phases of agile project management
Jim Highsmith, one of the original co-authors of the Agile Manifesto, introduced the five phases of agile project management. These points draw parallels to the five phases of project management. The phases have been used to provide a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) way of adopting agile project management.
Envision
The envision phase is the foundation of agile project management. Here, the project vision, scope, and goals are defined. During this phase, stakeholders and the project team come together to establish high-level objectives, set milestones, and identify potential challenges. It is an important phase that sets the groundwork for the project and aligns the team and stakeholders around a shared vision for achieving a successful project.
Speculate
The speculate phase sets the direction to start work on the project in a systematic and planned manner. This phase involves translating and breaking down large-scale objectives into workable items, detailed planning, creating a roadmap, and outlining how to achieve project goals. In the agile approach to project management, teams utilize this phase to set flexible timelines to adapt to changes based on continuous feedback loops, prioritize work, set team-level milestones, and prepare for efficient project execution.
Explore
Once scope setting and planning are complete, the explore phase kicks off. This is where planning turns into execution. During this phase, the product starts taking shape through iterative cycles called sprints, involving a continuous series of developing, testing, and refining. The explore phase is the heart of agile project management, embracing flexibility and improvements based on feedback to steer the project towards its goals.
Adapt
The adapt phase emphasizes on agility through adapting, improving, and refining based on constructive feedback. In this phase, the team takes a step back to reflect on what went well and what didn't, brainstorming solutions to improve processes and team dynamics to ensure the project progresses in the right direction.
Close
This phase marks the end of a project's lifecycle. Here, the team finalizes deliverables, ensures that everything about the project is properly documented, and confirms stakeholder satisfaction before formally closing the project. During the closing phase, the team thoroughly reviews the project from start to finish to identify areas for improvement, capture lessons, and celebrate achievements before the formal conclusion.
Who can benefit from Agile Project Management
When we are making breakthroughs in science and technology every day, embracing change has become second nature. It's almost Darwinian to say that if you don't keep improving, you're going to become obsolete. We make plans and drop relationships with a single text. In a sense, aren't we all agile?
The agile approach, which started out as an experiment for software-practitioners, has insinuated itself into every industry as a productivity mantra. Marketing, advertising, event planning, publications, and even food distributors have used agile knowledge to turn their luck around. We could almost call it a New Age Movement.
What are the frameworks within the agile methodology?
Agility is the umbrella term beneath which many frameworks have mushroomed over the years. It's a mindset, and a framework is a set of rules with which you can convert lofty principles into tangible practices that you can incorporate in your work.
There have been many frameworks over the years. Here are a few popular frameworks within the agile methodology.
Scrum
Scrum is an iterative incremental approach to software development under agile project management and is the most popular framework under the agile methodology. In Scrum, you split your work into chunks on which you work for set periods of time. These time boxes—called sprints— are tracked on a Scrum board and should result in a working piece of software. Scrum prescribes an inspect-and-adapt approach. So with each sprint, they adapt by incorporating lessons from previous sprints.
Scrum has 3 roles - Product Owner, Scrum Master and the development team. They each have distinct roles to play. The Scrum process starts with the "backlog" —a list of requirements—where each requirement is broken down into user stories and their corresponding tasks. These user stories are prioritized in order to plan the next sprint. There are several reports in Scrum that help a team measure the performance of a sprint - velocity, burnup, burndown, cumulative flow diagram. Scrum also emphasizes in face-to-face communication and small feedback loops within the team which is why meetings play an important role in the Scrum process.
Kanban
Kanban is a method to visualize your workflow that lets you identify bottlenecks and increase productivity by limiting the amount of work in progress. It's based on the Japanese philosophy Kaizen, the idea that small continuous changes result in a substantial movement over time.
A basic Kanban board typically has three columns - "To do", "In progress", and "Done." Each work item is written on a Kanban card which also holds details like the description of the work item and the assignee. The Kanban cards are placed in their respective columns on the board. Each column has a work-in-progress limit which prevents the team from becoming overburdened and lets them focus on delivering quality work.
Kanban is a flow-based agile project management method which advocates continual delivery. Performance is usually measured by how long a work item takes to go from "To do" to "Done" on the board. This method focuses solely on preventing capacity overload and enabling quality and continuous delivery.
Extreme project management (XPM)
Extreme project management is an agile approach best suited for complex, fast-paced, and non-hierarchical projects with high uncertainty. It underscores constant adaptation and resilience to achieve desired outcomes. The XPM approach prioritizes flexibility, allowing frequent changes in timelines and strategies, and using trial-and-error to keep pace with evolving technologies and dynamic environments.
Feature driven development (FDD)
Feature-driven development, also known as FDD, is a methodology in the agile framework centered on providing timely updates and fully functional features to clients. Unlike Scrum, which is a delivery-focused approach, FDD is feature-driven, where fully functional features must be rolled out every 2–10 days, whereas a sprint cycle lasts for two weeks to a month. The feature-driven approach in agile project management values documentation and highly relies on it, while other methods conduct daily meetups as a source of communication for updates.
The FDD approach was devised by IT strategist Jeff De Luca in 1997 to manage a project for a bank in Singapore, which turned out to be a huge success, leading to widespread adoption of the FDD model.
This approach is designed around five crucial steps spanning the entire product lifecycle, focusing on large feature-specific projects:
- Develop an overall model
- Build a feature list
- Plan by feature
- Design by feature
- Build by feature
Dynamic systems development method (DSDM)
The dynamic systems development method is an agile approach introduced in 1994 as an improvement to project management, replacing the rapid application development (RAD) approach. DSDM adheres to strict timelines and budgets, supported by ranking requirements from the highest level of importance to the lowest.
The DSDM approach includes the following five phases:
- Feasibility study
- Business study
- Functional model iteration
- Design and build
- Implementation
Adaptive software development (ASD)
This agile project management methodology emphasizes extensive and rapid adaptability and responsiveness to changing requirements and environments, evolving products with little planning, and continuous learning experiences. ASD focuses on the quality of outcomes rather than the tasks performed to achieve them.
There are three phases in ASD reflecting unpredictability and continuous learning:
- Speculate
- Collaborate
- Learn
Kanban vs Scrum: How to pick one?
The "Kanban vs Scrum" is quite a popular debate within agile project management circles. While there are some key differences between the two, both are fundamentally based on agile principles like adapting to change, transparency and constant, consistent improvement.
Scrum is more prescriptive of the two with strict time boxes, ceremonies and artifacts. Kanban is favored by teams who deliver continuously and are working on optimizing their workflow. If you don't like either, there's a third option Scrumban, which combines the structure of Scrum and the flexibility of Kanban.
Each team operates differently. The framework you choose for your team depends on your work, your organizational culture and your team dynamic. That being said, the framework you choose will directly influence your team's productivity and job satisfaction. So choose wisely :)
Agile in software development
Agile is a project management approach widely used in software development. This approach values flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous improvement from start to finish of the software development process through active collaboration and adaptation to dynamic requirements. Agile software development advocates delivering fully functional fragments of the software in increments rather than a single large release and incorporates regular iterations based on feedback.
Here are the steps every agile team follows to develop and deliver value to customers efficiently.
- Requirement gathering: In this phase, the scope and requirements are clearly defined, along with the time and effort needed to develop the software, to determine economic and technical feasibility.
- Planning: The next step is to create a proper roadmap to prioritize requirements and translate them into workable tasks. During the planning phase, the development team prioritizes work items and plans which features should be rolled out in what order.
- Development: Once planning is complete, the development team starts to build the software, aiming for fully functional features or fragments of the software with minimal errors. At this stage, the software undergoes multiple iterations based on a continuous feedback loop.
- Testing: In this phase, the developed software is thoroughly tested to identify and fix bugs and analyze performance, ensuring the quality of the software.
- Deployment: Once the software passes quality assurance, it is pushed into the live environment for customers to use.
- Maintenance: The software is monitored and maintained regularly to ensure it continues meeting customer expectations and needs.
How does an agile project management software help projects?
In today's competitive software development era, where quickly seizing the right opportunities and adapting to changing customer needs and market dynamics has become crucial for success, companies are shifting to agile project management methods. Every project team that aims to develop and deliver products in proper iterations and increments requires robust and efficient agile project management software to support and execute an agile project where design, development, and testing can happen simultaneously.
Agile project management software helps project teams by allowing them to:
- Create projects.
- Plan and prioritize project requirements.
- Execute sprints and track progress.
- Visualize progress and analyze performance, pitfalls, and potential risks.
- Support release plans for incremental delivery.
- Enable extensive communication with stakeholders and across teams to plan, execute, and deliver value to customers.
What is the difference between agile and waterfall methodologies?
The waterfall methodology proposes a linear, set approach to project management where all the variables are decided during the planning phase and the rest is merely execution. Agile methodology in project management acknowledges the uncertainty that accompanies changing technologies in a fast-paced world and proposes iterative short-term planning to combat it. Work is split into small sizable chunks which are worked on consecutively. With each part comes changes in requirements or improvements in technology that make the subsequent parts more efficient and effective.
Thus the agile approach to project management advocates constant learning and adapting in order to produce quality end products that perfectly satisfy the customer’s requirements while keeping up with current technology trends.
- Linear and sequential approach
- Focuses on project delivery
- Project is split into phases
- Requirements are taken only at the start of the process
- Avoids scope changes once development begins
- Strict project deadlines enforced by the project manager
- Focused on executing the plan
- Incremental and iterative approach
- Focuses on customer satisfaction
- Project is split into sprints
- Requirements are expected to change and evolve
- Incorporates changes even late in the development
- Teams are encouraged to be self-organizing
- Focused on delivering working software
Hybrid project management: Blending traditional project management with agile
Agile is undoubtedly the booming trend in today's project management era. However, the advantages of traditional project management cannot be denied. When weighing both project management frameworks, they have their own pros and cons, making it difficult to choose one methodology over another. That's why hybrid project management is the ideal solution, where strategic planning from the classic method is combined with the flexibility and iterative nature of agile to manage and achieve projects triumphantly.
Learn more about hybrid project management and its benefits here.
Going agile with Zoho Sprints
Agility is a concept, and an agile tool is merely a catalyst that helps you convert your ambitious principles into tangible metrics. You must decide what you want out of a tool before the evaluation process.
Visibility is good, but it should come with better collaboration. Extensive reports are great but they should incite better reflection. Accountability is essential, but it should also help team motivation. A tool should help standardize a process but not stay married to it.
An indispensable part of the agile process is change. That includes the process itself. So customization is great, but you need to go easy on the frills if you're going to keep tweaking your process after every retrospective. It's important that your tool needs to be flexible.
We kept all of that in mind as we developed Zoho Sprints, a lightweight, flexible tool that can be used equally well by teams large and small, industries IT and non-IT, and seasoned agilists as well as beginners.
Access Zoho SprintsFAQ
What is the agile project methodology?
The agile project methodology is an iterative approach that breaks large-scale objectives into small, achievable chunks, which are then planned and completed in time-boxed cycles called sprints. This approach focuses on delivering fully-functional portions of the product in increments, also known as a minimum viable product, through planned release cycles and relies on continuous feedback loops to improve product quality and reduce large-scale failures throughout the product's lifecycle.
How do you implement the agile methodology in projects?
Here are several steps to implement the agile methodology in project management successfully.
Decide if agile is the right approachBefore implementing the agile methodology, it is crucial to determine if this approach is the right fit for your team and project. This decision can be based on multiple factors, such as the nature of the projects your team works on and the overall organizational culture.
Select an agile frameworkThere is a plethora of agile frameworks and practices to choose from, serving different purposes and requirements. When selecting an appropriate agile project management framework, consider the character and size of your team and the project requirements to choose the approach that works best for your team.
Plan your projects wellThe next step towards an agile approach is to plan your projects meticulously. Planning is essential for clearly delineating the scope and objectives and preventing unexpected setbacks through setting up clear roadmaps and project backlogs.
Measure successAgile methodology emphasizes continuous improvement, so it is important to measure success to understand what went well and what did not to help teams perform better in upcoming projects. This can be achieved through regular retrospectives and sprint reviews.
When should you use agile project management?
Agile project management might not be the right approach for every team and project, so you should be careful when determining which management style will best suit your needs. The agile methodology is effective for projects that can accommodate evolving requirements and solve issues as they arise during the project's lifecycle. It is also a good fit for projects focused on frequent delivery of minimum viable products (MVPs) and constant feedback to improve and align deliverables based on customer needs.
For example, consider a retail shop that wants to develop an ecommerce website for the holiday season with a set of features that may evolve or require new add-ons as the project progresses. In this case, the project team could adopt agile methods to develop an MVP of the website with essential features, including the registration page, shopping cart, basic checkout process, and product listings. They would then release it to stakeholders to use, allowing them to browse, select, and purchase products. This process enables the team to gather initial feedback, adapt and iterate in response to changing requirements, and deliver incrementally.
