Agile Management Principles

Description

OVERVIEW OF AGILE MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES

What is Agile Project Management?
Agile is an iterative approach to project or project management that emphasize the importance of continuou and constant improvement that enables teams to provide their customers with valuable products and services as quickly and effectively as possible.Though it started mainly with a focus on software companies in the 70s, its effective model, principle and values have been quickly adopted across many different industries. Its emphasis on collaboration and efficiency have brought about a new ideal methodology for innovation, development and growth. In 2001, a group of developers built the Agile Manifesto, a “formal proclamation of four key values and 12 principle to guide an iterative and people-centric approach to software development,”, that form the foundations of Agile approaches to project management today.These two statements round up the guiding Agile Manifesto:

• Projects should be built around individuals that are motivated. These individuals should be provided with the support and environment required to get the job done.
• Self-organizing teams contribute to the best requirements, designs, and architecture.

Project Management Phases:
Regardless of the scope, any project should follow a sequence of actions to be controlled and managed. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), a typical project management process includes the following phases:

initiation,
planning,
execution,
performance/monitoring, and
project close.

Agile is an umbrella term for a vast variety of methodologies and techniques, sharing the principles and values described above. Each of them has its own areas of use and distinctive features. The most popular frameworks and practices are Scrum, Kanban, Hybrid, Lean, Bimodal, XP, and Crystal. 

Scrum Roles and Accountabilities:

Scrum is aimed at sustaining strong collaboration between people working on complex product, and details are being changed or added. It is based upon the systematic interactions between the three major roles with defined accountabilities: Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the Team.

Scrum Master is a central figure within a project. His principal responsibility is to eliminate all the obstacles that might prevent the team from working efficiently.

Product Owner, usually a customer or other stakeholder, is actively involved throughout the project, conveying the global vision of the product and providing timely feedback on the job done after every Sprint.

Scrum Team is a cross-functional and self-organizing group of people that is responsible for the product implementation. It should consist of up to 7 team members to stay flexible and productive. Recently, the focus has been shifted from a self-organizing scrum team to self-managing, meaning it is up to a team to decide who does what, when, and how internally.

Scrum and Kanban are two of the most widely used Agile frameworks. They are very well known for encouraging decision-making and preventing time consumption on variables that are bound to change. It stresses customer satisfaction and uses available teams to fast-track software development at every stage.

Reasons for the transition to Agile:
Most of the organizations that transitioned from traditional to Agile project management have listed the following reasons:

Improves collaboration between teams- 54%
Enhances the quality level of software in organizations- 52%
Results in enhanced customer satisfaction- 49%
Speeds time to market- 43%
Reduces development cost- 42%

Agile Terminologies you need to know:

Agile – the approach to project management that involves the delivery of requirements incrementally and iteratively.

Agile development – this is an umbrella term used to refer to methodologies for iterative software development. Some of the common methods include Lean, eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum.

Agile Manifesto – this describes the four principles of agile development that we will be discussing in detail later

Daily Scrum – this refers to a stand-up team meeting.

Scrum – this is where regular team meetings are held to evaluate the progress of a development phase. This methodology is commonly used in software development.

Scrum of scrums – this is a technique that is used when multiple teams are working on the same product. It enables operation for Scrum on a larger scale.

Scrum master – as the name suggests, this individual is responsible for overlooking the development process and ensures teams are working together and integrating smoothly.

Scaled Agile – this is when Agile is scaled up to large programs or projects.

Sprint – a short, focused period allocated for teams to a task.

In traditional software development, the customer is involved only at the start of the development process. Hence, by the time, the project reaches its culmination, a lot of errors and unnecessary expenditure would have happened.  Since Agile software development allows the customer to get involved at each stage, improvisations can be made then and there. This helps us in saving cost. Therefore, Agile project management is the real deal. It not only allows greater team collaboration but also paves way for superior results due to its flexibility.