Agile Project Management - What Actually is it?

The Confusion

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of confusion about agile project management and what it actually is. In many cases it is used as a term when in reality Scrum or DSDM is being used and there is no real project management happening. There is a difference between Project Management and Product Management which use these methodologies. Agile project management is project management done in an agile way, which still means it's about PID's, tasks, milestones, risks, issues, stakeholder management and budget control, and all the other tasks that you associate with a project manager. 

Where some of this confusion comes from is talk of agile methodologies. There is no actual agile methodology. What you must realise is that the starting point for much of this was the Agile Manifesto developed in 2001, or to give it its full name, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Scrum, DSDM and all the other methodologies in use to build software are ways of delivering to the themes of the Manifesto. And it's a great starting point, but for agile project management you have to adapt these themes from product to project. 

Although there are now courses on Agile Project Management and Agile Prince2, I still read much confusion and crossover with Scrum. In fact, nearly all the agile project management books I own start to talk about Scrum and DSDM very early on and almost remove the project management element from the book. And if you’re developing a product then Scrum is an excellent way to do this and one I have used many times. However, project management usually sits a tier above this and as much as Scrum puts the emphasis on the team to deliver without a top-down approach, many of us work in industries where there needs to be the project management tier above the day-to-day delivery of the project to manage upwards reporting and governance. There are also many organisations that simply don’t have the resources to form full Scrum teams and the differing roles required.

So in true agile form, you have to adapt and look at the most efficient way of delivering projects, and not just product projects, your whole digital and transformation programme should be run on an agile project management basis. 

But what does this really mean?

In any project what you are really doing is managing time, resources, and deliverables. In most projects you have a really good insight into the deliverables and work out how much time and resource you need to deliver them. In agile project management you will know the resource and time and you work out the deliverables as you go. Well, that's the theory but in reality, you’re going to need to understand the outcomes to be delivered and for projects that have a legislative element you obviously need to understand this too upfront. I’d expect that to be part of any business case but as per one of the themes of the Agile manifesto - Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Therefore, change is to be expected and encouraged in an agile project. And that needs to be managed, In Scrum that is through backlogs and prioritising features that provide the most value. In agile project management that means accepting changing requirements and documenting these in a simple and straightforward way, without having an overly burdensome change control process. Agin you can look at elements of the Agile Manifesto such as:  

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential 

and 

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation 

and apply these to project management. The same is true of the other themes of the Agile Manifesto. But you must apply these to your organisation, the project types you work on, the levels of governance your industry has, the resources you have and work out what interpretation works best for you. 

 5D Agile

Because of the confusion and there really being no simple way to define agile project management, I have created my own agile project framework called 5D Agile. Details of this can be found here https://ditchpm.co.uk/5d-agile. I use this framework to deliver all my projects with customers, including large programmes of work. 

I have taken the most useful elements of Scrum, DSDM, Prince2 and my own knowledge to create 5D-Agile project management. This gives project managers who want to manage projects in a more agile way a framework to base their project on. It simply breaks a project down into a series of timeboxes, that we refer to as Races, and each Race broken down into a series of Tasks. Tasks are allocated one of five categories, which are Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design and Deliver. Although I have my own version of what each task type means, PMs are able to give their own criteria to this. At the end of each Race, it is easy to see how many tasks have been completed or not, and whether you are having enough conversations, and full audit view of discovery sessions and decisions that have been made. This flexibility gives PM's the opportunity to amend 5D Agile as they see fit to work better for their organisation. (And not a Gantt chart to be seen anywhere!)

The best way to think about agile project management is to look at all frameworks and find what elements work best for your organisation. Even if you look at Scrum, it is just the bringing together the best elements of multiple other methodologies into a single one. There won't always be one size fits all, and so you have to look at all methodologies and create what works for your business. This will include trial and error and tweaking how you deliver your projects. Different industries will have different levels of governance and reporting requirements. You have to be agile in adapting what works for you. 

Once you find out how you want to work, you can then look at the tools available that help you deliver. You should not be buying a tool and then fitting your working practices to it. You find the tool that supports your work. We have developed ditch (https://ditchpm.co.uk/) to be flexible enough to amend and configure elements of the system to work for you. However, the core of the system, Projects, Races and Tasks is set, so if that works for how you want to work then it will work for you, and we can then configure it to your exact requirements. If this model doesn't work for you then it's the wrong tool. Don't go and buy the software first and then try to adapt to how the software works. 

If you’d like more information on 5D Agile or ditch, then please do not hesitate to contact us.